The use of Internet-based groupware in new product forecasting

New product development is a risky business. Companies can use a number of methods to assess the viability of a new product and reduce the risks associated with it. Judgmental new product forecasting is one of the widely used methods. Previous studies outline numerous ways of eliciting judgmental group forecasts with their advantages and disadvantages. With the rapid growth of the Internet, there are now also a few Internet-based group discussion tools that can offer valuable opportunities for judgmental new product forecasting. This paper presents an application of Internet-based groupware in judgmentally forecasting the adoption of two Internet services. The results showed that the participants found the method to be easy, reasonable, and interesting and felt confident about their contributions to the group discussions. The findings also showed that the predictions based on this method were reasonably accurate with absolute errors of 4% to 5%.