Decision Making and Decision Support Within New Product Development

Abstract

There is an extensive literature on new product and process development (NPD). However, the analysis of decision making and decision support requirements in this area is less well researched. Here we discuss decision making in the context of NPD and identify decision types and decision attributes relevant to the NPD context. They illustrate the approach by analyzing NPD decisions in three industrial cases with a focus on early stage NPD decisions. They create a set of attributes with reference to the decision making literature. They find these attributes can be used to codify decisions in order to characterize them. They find the design decisions in these case studies to be creative and brainstorming-led with a low level of structure. The results provide insights both on decision making in NPD in practice and on the requirements for group decision support systems (GDSS) in this area. The authors suggest that an argumentation-based GDSS that allows structure to be developed may be suitable for these decisions. The cases are used to illustrate the application of the approach and show an interesting set of example decision types, but do not cover the range of NPD decisions that may be evident in a larger set of companies.