Operation Management: Prediction of New Product Development Performance at Pre-Product Launch Stage

Abstract

New Product Development (NPD) performance has increasingly been viewed as an essential indicator for organizational competitiveness and success. However, in the current literature of NPD, NPD performance measures are tends to focus on assessment of performance at the ending phase of NPD process (i.e. after product launch). Assessment of NPD performance before product launch is not widely discussed. Hence, this paper aims to address the research gap by developing models to predict NPD performance at the front end stage of NPD process. In line with this, 5 important NPD process constructs and 7 NPD management constructs were identified from literature review. These constructs were subsequently formulated into a survey questionnaire and responded by 186 Research and Development (R&D) staffs from R&D companies in Malaysia. Thereafter, the NPD process and management constructs were regressed with the perceived NPD performance to develop models for NPD performance prediction prior to product launch. Finally, discussion on researchs finding and recommendations are included at the end of this paper.