New Product Development Workshop

15 Aug 2019

New Product Development workshop - August 2019

That's the call from Great South and to make it happen they are holding a product development workshop, aimed at established Southland businesses and startups entrepreneurs, on the 17th October.

The workshop will be hosted by New Product Development Specialist Saskia van der Geest who with over twenty years of experience focusing on improving new product development will help local businesses to realise their innovation potential.

What the workshop will include:

  • The basics of new product development (NPD), including jargon, common challenges and tools and tips to achieve goals
  • Introduction to lean NPD thinking including how to capture knowledge for re-use
  • Introduction to agile thinking and how you can implement this to your business
  • Several workshops where you can apply the insights learnt to your own examples


About the host

Saskia van der Geest MSc. is an active consultant and coach in the field of New Product Development. She helps management teams to improve profitability and market share through setting up their organisations to predictably deliver a continuous stream of profitable high-quality new products (or services) faster.

She specialises in improving the product development process (from ideas to profits) to consistently deliver ‘faster, better, more profitable’. That is: better quality new products (or services), in shorter time frames, with reduced cost, higher margins and reduced risk. To make that happen successfully she works closely with the key team involved in creating new products for the market: the management team, the R&D team, operations, Sales & Marketing, QA and engineering.

Clients range from medium-size businesses to large multinational blue-chip firms, who operate in a large range of industries from retailers, to manufacturers in the food & beverage, consumer goods, timber, health care, electronics and plastics industries, to government and the storage industry. Some of the well-known businesses that Saskia has worked with are: New Zealand King Salmon, Barkers of Geraldine, Annabel Langbein Books, F&P Healthcare, Siemens, and GE Plastics.


Workshop details

17 October 2019 
9am - 4:30pm 
Great South, 143 Spey Street 

General Admission: $400 + GST (Early Bird rate of $350 +GST available until 16 September)*
Businesses may be eligible for capability voucher funding that would subsidise up to 50% of the cost.
RSVP by contact Ben Lewis

Ben Lewis
Ben Lewis
Southland Business Accelerator Programme Manager
ben@greatsouth.nz