New Product Development Approach Research Articles

Critical Factors Influencing New Product Development Success in Sierra Leone Brewery Limited

This research investigates the crucial factors that affect new product development (NPD) in the beverage industry, concentrating on Sierra Leone Brewery Limited (SLBL). Acknowledging the inherent risks and uncertainties in NPD, the study seeks to recognize and assess both internal and external factors that influence the success of new product initiatives at SLBL. The analysis examines key elements (timing, pricing, packaging, testing, competition, market selection, promotional strategies, and brand development) to enhance our understanding of factors shaping new product introductions within the company. The study uses a case study approach, analyzing primary and secondary data to understand SLBL's new product development. It employs a phenomenological research approach involving stakeholders like managers, product developers, marketing personnel, and consumers. The study utilizes the supply chain and distribution theory as a theoretical framework to understand the factors influencing new product development in the beverage industry. SLBL adopts a meticulous NPD approach, using feasibility studies for decision-making. The concept development phase outlines a trajectory and collaboration, serving as a blueprint. Crafting business cases ensures strategic alignment, and the asset and recipe development phase emphasizes innovation. In material ordering, production, and sampling, SLBL prioritizes strategic procurement and stringent quality control. The success of the product launch depends on factors like market timing and effective promotional strategies. Diverse research methods contribute to a comprehensive analysis, and strategic recommendations include innovation, rebranding, extensive promotion, repositioning, and careful financial allocation. SLBL's NPD approach reflects strategic foresight and commitment to excellence for sustained success in a competitive market.

Success Sweeter than Sugar: New Product Development Strategies of Successful Independent Bakeries in South Korea

It is widely accepted that successful products lead to a business's success as a whole. Therefore, creating new products, or New Product Development (NPD), must be carefully conducted to minimize the risks of new product failure. Economists often debate the effectiveness of customer-led (CL) approaches, market-oriented (MO) approaches, and the degree of product newness in NPD. Unfortunately, there is little existing research on applying these NPD approach considerations in the food industry, specifically the bakery sector, especially regarding independent businesses. In the ultra-competitive bakery industry in South Korea (Korea), independent bakeries must carefully hone their NPD process to attract customers and maintain a competitive advantage. To uncover the NPD processes of successful bakeries in Korea, structured interviews with five bakery owners of successful bakeries were conducted and analyzed for common themes through a thematic analysis. This study found that both CL and MO approaches were used for most of the five bakeries. Additionally, most of the bakeries tended to prioritize technological novelty over consumer perceptions of uniqueness. Further research is needed on the applicability of this study's results in industries with lower levels of neophobia to see if the NPD processes used by Korean independent bakeries are successful in various environments or solely in the Korean bakery market. The findings of this study may help independent bakery owners develop effective NPD processes based on consumer behaviors in Korea and the strategies of their competitors.

A novel extension of Pythagorean fuzzy MULTIMOORA approach for new product development

This study explores how to enhance the decision-making processes in the phases of idea generation or alternative selection during the new product development (NPD) process. NPD is acknowledged as the central function of businesses in an increasingly competitive marketplace. In the current era, the highly uncertain and rapidly changing market environment makes the NPD extremely vague and complex. To be able to find a suitable solution to this complexity, the proposed research aims to categorize the decision points in the process of NPD regarding software development and identify the fuzziness elements affecting the process. The goal of a decision-making process is to prioritize several alternatives with respect to some required objectives and to select the best among them. Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) may support reaching a consensus judgment with the collective assessment of Decision Makers (DMs). We introduce a novel evaluation approach for this problem. The proposed approach employs a MULTIMOORA (Multi-objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis plus the Full Multiplicative Form) MCDM technique under Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets (PFSs) objective world environment to cope with an ambiguous environment using Group Decision Making (GDM) setting to shape the decisions. The PFSs have demonstrated their advantages in dealing with vagueness and uncertainty over crisp, fuzzy, or intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Therefore, PFSs can represent the DMs’ judgments and preferences in a better structure, ensuring enhanced decision-making in a group consensus. A case study on gaming software and app development is presented to validate the functionality of the proposed method. The results are compared and assessed with the help of a sensitivity analysis. This research makes a real contribution to the literature by proposing a novel evaluation method to rate and select NPD (gaming software and apps) to deal with the inexactness and vagueness associated with the criteria and alternatives.

The Design of Interactive Training for Digital Transformation: A Practice-Oriented Case Study

Hybrid approaches to new product development are blurring the boundaries between established models, such as Lean, Stage-Gate and Agile. The actual implementation of the principles of these archetypical approaches seems to be contingent to the features of the product to innovate and the organisation in which the product development effort is made. This paper investigates how Lean, Agile, and Stage-Gate product development principles can foster the design, development and delivery of a training program for digital transformation in a knowledge intensive business service that delivers training by relying on a simulated, highly-realistic, digitalised business environment. The conception and execution of a new training program requires a new product development effort since it significantly departs from the current offering of the training provider and involves the coordination of multiple stakeholders. Through a practice-oriented case study methodology, this investigation examines whether a hybrid organisational method is a viable approach for new product development and assesses its practical feasibility and effectiveness.

Design principles of hybrid approaches in new product development: a systematic literature review

Setting the right approach for new product development (NPD) in the presence of uncertainty remains an ongoing debate in innovation management. Stage‐gate systems (SGS) and agile methodology (AM) are the dominant approaches. Recently, hybrid approaches (combining SGS and AM) have been proposed. Although these hybrid approaches represent a significant development in NPD, combining them without considering their design principles might lead to contradictory and competing conceptual formulations, thus increasing the difficulty of comparison among studies. Moreover, scholars and practitioners may struggle to understand when, why and how a certain configuration of the NPD process provides the right response to different manifestations of uncertainty. The current literature faces problems regarding the clarity of design principles (e.g. flexibility and adaptability), and this has led to research gaps concerning the uncertainty contingency and outcomes of hybrid approaches. This study combines bibliometric and content analyses to identify four design parameters and principles of NPD hybrid approaches: flexibility, adaptability, velocity and integration. Our findings might help advance the development and comparison of different hybrid approaches.

Analysis of sentiment expressions for user-centered design

Devising intelligent systems capable of identifying the idiosyncratic needs of users at scale and translating them into attribute-level design feedback and recommendations is a key prerequisite for successful user-centered design processes. Recent studies show that 49% of design firms lack systems and tools for monitoring external platforms, and only 8% have adopted digital, data-driven approaches for new product development despite acknowledging them as a high priority. The state-of-the-art attribute-level sentiment analysis approaches based on deep learning have achieved promising results; however, these methods pose strict preconditions, require manually labeled data for training and pre-defined attributes by experts, and only classify sentiments intro predefined categories which have limited implications for designers. This article develops a rule-based methodology for extracting and analyzing the sentiment expressions of users on a large scale, from myriad reviews available on social media and e-commerce platforms. The methodology further advances current unsupervised attribute-level sentiment analysis approaches by enabling efficient identification and mapping of sentiment expressions of individual users onto their respective attributes. Experiments on a large dataset scraped from a major e-commerce retail store for apparel and indicate 74.3%–93.8% precision in extracting attribute-level sentiment expressions of users and demonstrate the feasibility and potentials of the developed methodology for large-scale need finding from user reviews.

QFD-Based Product Design for Multisegment Markets: A Fuzzy Chance-Constrained Programming Approach

Modern companies are moving rapidly toward more customer-oriented approaches for new product design and development. In real-world applications, customer requirements are more diverse and rather heterogeneous in practice, which requires the targeted market to be multisegmented. In this article, employing the quality function deployment (QFD) and assuming that parameter uncertainty exists, we propose a new fuzzy QFD model for use in multisegment markets, to search for optimal engineering characteristics by maximizing the overall customer satisfaction score. Under that framework, and when the credibility measure is employed, we adopt a fuzzy chance-constrained programming setting to convert the fuzzy model into its crisp counterpart. Afterwards, an analytical method based on fuzzy operational law is proposed to further transform the chance-constrained programming into an equivalent explicit model that can be solved directly by a standard commercial software. For a targeted group of customers, a new yoghurt design is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of our treatment. We report that our methodology not only permits the selection of the preferred solution based on an acceptable level of risk, which is very important in practice, but also guarantees higher customer satisfaction scores. This fact extends the fuzzy QFD methodology to a wider range of applications.

Declarative Modelling Approach for New Product Development

Abstract The paper is concerned with using constraint programming for simulating an alternative project completion of new product development (NPD). All possible variants of project completion are sought within the company’s resources and requirements for an NPD project. A company and its projects can be considered in terms of variables and constraints that constitute the systems approach for a project prototyping problem. This problem is described in the form of a constraint satisfaction problem and implemented with the use of constraint programming techniques. The paper also presents a method for estimating the NPD cost and unit production cost, and simulating variants that ensure the desirable level of costs, including the impact of granularity on the number of solutions. An example shows the applicability of the proposed approach in the context of NPD projects.

Local or Global? Approaches for New Product Development in Low Income Countries

To increase opportunity and quality of life for people living in poverty, governments and non-government organizations (NGOs) sell products to low-income countries. These are typically products that can make fundamental changes to the quality of life such as water filters and solar lighting. However, there has been limited research to support the new product development (NPD) process for this unique category of products which has led to instances of sub-optimal solutions. This paper explores the nature of design and manufacture in these countries, and the impact of local and global approaches has on product development. Empirical data has been generated through interviews with ten senior staff from NGOs; ten product users, and observations of the NPD process in Myanmar. The findings identify that the development of products undertaken in developed countries could provide can provide high-quality solutions, but at the expense of user insight and local capacity building.

Adding Sustainability to Lean Product Development

Where there are calls for sustainable products, the inclusion of sustainability in formal approaches for new product development is still in its infancy. Firms face challenges in (i) managing development of new sustainable products that offer value to customers, (ii) reducing time-to-market and (iii) efficient use of resources. Contrastingly, the rationalisation found in lean product development that addresses these concerns, but not yet sustainability, has attracted the attention of many since its inception in the 1990s. The increasing adoption of lean product development by firms offers the opportunity to also include sustainability in its processes, methods and tools; this will allow new products to be economically profitable, ecologically correct, operationally safe, socially fair and culturally accepted. To this purpose, this paper performs a systematic literature review to find existing methods and tools of lean product development that contribute to sustainability. The findings lead to inference that there is not a lack of methods and tools, but their use. Furthermore, from an integral perspective of sustainability, just a few tools cover the social dimension or the three dimensions all together. Consequently, a holistic systems approach that bring integration and synergy to the use of methods and tools on sustainable product development to the table is needed.

An Integrated SEM Neural Network Approach to Study Effectiveness of Brand Extension in Indian FMCG Industry

Brand extension as a strategy is used by corporates for increasing profits. It is an approach for new product development. Brand extensions have already been studied in the past few years, however, till now extensions have not been evaluated with the help of structural equation modeling (SEM) and neural networks (NNs) integrated approach. The NNs help to analyze nonlinear influence in data without prior knowledge of such influences. The SEM helps to validate framework proposed in the study and the significant variables gathered through SEM are used as an input for NNs. The major advantage of such kind of hybrid technique is to understand the causal relationships in the variables, followed by the prediction of factors which influence brand extension. The study is based on the recent brand extension done by brand Frooti in the form of Frooti Fizz (an aerated fruit drink). It is a cross-sectional study with the sample size of 281 respondents from Delhi/NCR region. The results of the study are useful for a comprehensive understanding of factors affecting brand extension and also to identify the relative importance of each of them through the use of NN Technique.

UNDERSTANDING INTERNATIONAL PRODUCT STRATEGY IN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS THROUGH NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES AND EVOLUTION

International product strategy regarding global standardisation and local adaptation is one of the challenges faced by multinational corporations (MNCs). Studies in this area have tested the antecedents and consequences of standardisation/adaptation, but lack a new product development (NPD) perspective. In this study, we explore how product standardisation/adaptation is determined in the NPD context. Through a qualitative case study of four MNCs, we found three NPD approaches: multi-local, adaptation-based and platform-based. We analysed the advantages and challenges of each approach. In addition, we reveal how the factors (development of information and communication technology, competition pressure, brand awareness and technical capability) could influence the choice of a certain NPD approach. We draw implications on the paths to ensuring full leveraging of the benefits of a platform-based approach.

Effectuation-causation: what happens in new product development?

PurposeThe literature provides contradictory findings on planning contradictory findings on planning as a success factor in projects which entail high innovation. Nevertheless, new product development (NPD) research has mainly adopted the causation lens, in which planning plays an important role. By embracing the logic of effectuation, the purpose of this paper is to secure a wider perspective concerning how the various NPD options develop, taking into account the role played by uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachBy adopting an inductive approach, the authors attempt to advance existing knowledge on the topic. The qualitative methodology (documentary analysis, content analysis and alternate templates) is adopted for the analysis of four NPD projects in the food industry in Spain.FindingsResults reflect the relevance of the two perspectives considered when explaining the NPD process, with the presence of hybrid behaviour in all the projects and effectuation emerging as the dominant logic in the project linked to a greater degree of innovation and uncertainty.Research limitations/implicationsProjects involving varying degrees of innovation would seem to require different NPD approaches. This paper provides an initial approach to the subject, and it analyses a small number of firms. It is necessary to better understand to what extent the two logics are present in different types of projects.Practical implicationsBy incorporating the logic of effectuation, firms might consider using NPD as a means of engaging in projects that entail a higher degree of innovation, since it offers ways of dealing with the uncertainty linked to such projects.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the still early efforts to apply the perspective of effectuation to the area of NPD, by linking the logics of effectuation and causation to the various NPD processes taking account of their varying degrees of innovation and uncertainty (exploitation, exploration and leverage options).

Ideator Expertise and Cocreator Inputs in Crowdsourcing‐Based New Product Development

Crowdsourcing‐based new product development (NPD) involves consumers in contributing ideas as ideators in the ideation phase, and providing inputs as cocreators in self‐selected subtasks in the product development phase. The novelty of this NPD approach furnishes little understanding about the effect of crowds' self‐select participation into ideation and development subtasks, and this study aims to bridge this gap. This article draws on the attention allocation perspective of online knowledge sharing to identify the domains of ideator expertise based on the types of development subtasks they self‐selected to perform as cocreators in prior projects. It separately examines the impact of different domains of ideator expertise (marketing and engineering) and the interaction between ideators' expertise and cocreators' inputs on crowdsourcing‐based NPD outcomes. Large‐scale, longitudinal data from a crowdsourcing‐based NPD platform reveal that ideators' engineering expertise helps convert ideas into final products more than ideators' marketing expertise. In contrast, ideators' marketing expertise helps these products achieve more sales than ideators' engineering expertise. Moreover, final products achieve more sales if ideators' marketing expertise embedded in initial product ideas is later augmented with either marketing or engineering‐related development inputs by crowd cocreators. However, ideas generated by ideators with engineering expertise achieve fewer product sales when those ideas are complemented by more marketing‐related development inputs by cocreators. These findings extend crowdsourcing‐based NPD theory and furnish insight on managing crowdsourcing‐based NPD platforms.

Characterization of Food Product Innovation Practices with Reference to Functional Food Product Development in Singapore

Functional foods, being one of the major food categories of the global health and wellness market, are becoming a major focus of new product development (NPD) in the food industry. The development of functional foods is more complex than traditional food New Product Development (NPD), calling for a concerted effort from researchers and NPD experts to explore and understand the functional food product development (FFPD) process in more detail. The current research in this field has reported that there is a need to evolve from a traditional NPD approach, towards an integrative and innovative approach involving cooperative networks and techniques of commercialization. However, there is little practical evidence on how much progress has been made to date. Therefore, this research was designed to investigate the food product innovation process of food manufacturing in the Asia-Pacific region (Singapore) with reference to functional foods development. Results report on a comparative account of NPD practices between registered Singapore food companies that are doing some sort of functional food development (Group 1) and those that are not (Group 2). A significant difference (P<0.05) in the aims and mode of NPD between Group 1 and Group was observed. Further it was observed that food companies in Group 1 have significantly (P<0.05) more diverse external collaborations with broad aims to collaborate, in comparison with food companies in Group 2. This is a positive step toward developing an external resource base, which is essential in developing functional foods. This attitude should be encouraged in future innovation polices as being critical to value-added food product innovations in Singapore. Apart from these differences, food companies are still pursuing a traditional NPD approach (independent and closed NPD); with loose Intellectual Property protection practices irrespective of type of innovation activity. There is a need to create awareness among the stakeholders about the factors needed for developing unique and inimitable resources, and dynamic capabilities in food manufacturing.Â

The Impact of Customer Involvement on New Product Development: Contingent and Substitutive Effects

More and more companies are actively involving their customers in the new product development (NPD) process. However, there is little consensus regarding the contribution of customer involvement to new product outcomes. A better understanding of this contribution can shed light on whether and when it is worthwhile to involve customers and thus provide firms better guidelines for making such decisions. This study examines the effects of two forms of customer involvement on new product outcomes: the traditional form of customer involvement as an information source (CIS) and the more active form of customer involvement as co‐developers (CIC). The authors offer a better understanding of whether customer involvement can lead to successful innovation by (1) identifying conditions that impact the effects of CIS and CIC on NPD outcomes, (2) contrasting the conditional effects of CIS and CIC to understand how they influence NPD outcomes differently, and (3) examining the potential substitutive relationship between CIS and CIC to understand their joint effects in improving innovation. They find that an experimental NPD approach that emphasizes trial and error learning moderates the relationship between customer involvement and new product outcomes. Specifically, the results reveal contrasting contingent effects of CIS and CIC: CIS is more beneficial for new product outcomes when firms take a more experimental NPD approach, whereas the effect of CIC is stronger when the NPD process is characterized with lower experimentation. CIS and CIC also substitute for each other in their contribution to new product outcomes. These findings suggest that each of the two forms of customer involvement has its unique advantages and is suitable for different conditions. When considering the adoption of CIC, firms should take into account their learning approaches as well as the effectiveness of CIS in the NPD process.

Intelligent knowledge recommending approach for new product development based on workflow context matching

The variety of product types/specifications in discrete manufacturing enterprises makes new product development tasks real tough work. Therefore, it is a common strategy for workers to refer to similar outcomes (e.g. the product drawings and work instructions) of former new product development tasks. In order to discover similar historic outcome, this article presents an intelligent approach to measure the cohesion between workflow contexts in process-aware information systems and exploit it for runtime task knowledge recommendation. The measure of context similarity is preceded by (1) modeling the task context with ontology theory and (2) using the ontology matching algorithms to evaluate the similarities between context ontology entities of different tasks. Specifically, the term frequency–inverse document frequency approach is utilized to compute the context cohesion between current task and historic ones, and the tasks with the highest similarity will be recommended to the task executors, along with their outcomes. Comparative evaluation is performed using term frequency–inverse document frequency, Levenshtein, and Affine Gaps, and results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves good precision and recall and is efficient in task knowledge recommendation.

Global Standardisation Strategy and New Product Development in MNCs: Approaches and Evolution

Global product strategy regarding global product standardisation and local product adaptation is one of the challenges faced by multinational corporations (MNCs). Studies in this area have tested the antecedents and consequences of standardisation/adaptation, but very few have explored this issue in the context of new product development (NPD). In this study, I explore how product standardisation/adaptation is determined in the NPD context. Through a qualitative case study of four MNCs, I found that although the platform-based approach is superior to other approaches in terms of competition, not all firms are able to adopt this approach. I reveal how certain factors could influence the choice of a certain NPD approach. I draw implications on the importance of the NPD context to standardisation/adaptation of products.

A modified lead-user approach for new product development: an illustration from the US of a marketing research tool for the forest industry

Innovation is critical for firm success, including forest sector firms. However, historically forest sector firms have focused on process over product innovations. Additionally, research shows that forest sector firms often fail to have a structured new product development (NPD) process. The purpose of this work is to illustrate use of the lead-user method to identify user-lead ideas for innovation within the wood-window value chain, thereby demonstrating the potential of a modified lead-user approach as a NPD tool for the forest industry. Personal interviews with 22 individuals were conducted with sales agents, installation experts, homebuilders, and architects. Findings outline opportunities for the introduction of new products/services, thereby demonstrating the value of relying on lead-users for identifying potential products. This study also highlights the challenges associated with the lead-user methodology, including the varying definitions of a lead-user and the subjective nature of categorising someone as a lead-user.

Targeting the transitions: applying stage-gate® thinking in strategic environmental assessment

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) practitioners have a tendency to emphasize assessment phases over the linkages between the phases. Explicitly addressing the transitions between stages could add rigour to SEA processes and make them more structurally robust. There is a considerable body of research on project management practices used by corporations during new product development (NPD). The stage-gate® model is presented as an example of a successful and innovative NPD approach that is frequently used by various industries, and which addresses the links between assessment phases. Stage-gate theory treats connections between project stages as gates which must be passed. The philosophy behind the stage-gate model is explored as a macro-process that could support current practices in SEA and other types of impact assessment. The stages and gates designed for a proposed Nova Scotia SEA framework are presented to show how stage-gate thinking can be adapted for use in SEA processes. The paper concludes that SEA processes could become more efficient and effective by integrating a philosophy of gated assessments.