Track: Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

The innovation of new products has been part of the western economic paradigm. The main reason to innovate new products is to provide new value to the consumer. If there is no new value, there is no reason for them to trade their money for the new product. Thus, innovation is the engine for economic development. The need for new products represents opportunities for countries with unique biological and cultural characteristics, such as Bolivia. The country's location in South America combined with dramatic variations in topography and climate result in a wide range of ecosystems: landscapes of the Andes, dense rainforests of the Amazon, and dry forests of the Chaco. As a consequence, there is a rich variety of underexplored resources, such as native plants. These native plants evolved naturally in the region and are used by native people for their subsistence. However, no studies have considered their use for the development and innovation of new products. Therefore, for this research, we developed the formulation of a new liquor based on native plants from Bolivia. In particular, for the development of this new product: (a) we made an exhaustive literature review of Bolivian native plants for ethnocultural uses; (b) we optimized the liquor’s attributes through mixture design; and (c) we used design thinking to understand consumer preferences and adapt the new product to their taste. As a consequence, the results from our research suggest: (a) the combination of design thinking and mixture design allowed the successful development of a new liquor from 27 native plants; (b) the iterative nature of design thinking allowed the identification and adaptation of new liquor prototypes to consumer preferences and tastes; (c) market research found the prototype satisfied consumers. In general, the development of this new liquor suggests that countries with rich and varied ecosystems, such as Bolivia, offer new opportunities for the development of innovative products for local and international markets. Moreover, the combination of mixture design and design thinking offers new opportunities for new product development to reduce high combinatorial complexity.