A Curriculum Design Method for New Product Development

Abstract

An entrepreneurship movement is sweeping the world; new product development (NPD) is the core activity of an organization’s competitive strategy, which includes concept design and the successful development of new products that can be launched in the market. However, a surprising dearth of research has been conducted on what the components and knowledge should be embedded in the process of new product development. To orchestrate a timely curriculum, this study aims to analyze the published papers on new product development to shed light on comprehensive developments and trends within the field. Thus, the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was applied to extract research tropics based on scientific articles published between 2015 and 2019 and interpreted the results using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. The study identified ten educational objectives of NPD curriculum from the initial results. Furthermore, the domain knowledge and key components were derived from the corresponding educational objective. Consistent with previous findings and others’ assumptions, the study found that the scope of NPD curriculum is still expanding continuously; and the results herein can guide educators to design a more appropriate curriculum and to enhance students’ learning performance.