New Product Development Problems Research Articles

Graph-based knowledge reuse for supporting knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development

Pre-existing knowledge buried in manufacturing enterprises can be reused to help decision-makers develop good judgements to make decisions about the problems in new product development, which in turn speeds up and improves the quality of product innovation. This paper presents a graph-based approach to knowledge reuse for supporting knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. The paper first illustrates the iterative process of knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. Then, a novel framework is proposed to facilitate this process, where knowledge maps and knowledge navigation are involved. Here, OWL ontologies are employed to construct knowledge maps, which appropriately capture and organise knowledge resources generated at various stages of product lifecycle; the Personalised PageRank algorithm is used to perform knowledge navigation, which finds the most relevant knowledge in knowledge maps for a given problem in new product development. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach are demonstrated through a case study and two performance evaluation experiments.

Exploring the contribution of innovation intermediaries to the new product development (NPD) process: a typology and an empirical study

In the ‘knowledge economy’ upheld by the European Lisbon strategy, knowledge‐intensive services are considered a key driver for innovation and competitiveness. A category of knowledge‐intensive services that has become of utmost importance in the last few decades is new product development (NPD) services, which interconnect distant knowledge domains with the client firms. In addition to NPD service providers, web‐based innovation intermediaries have started to help innovative firms access dispersed bodies of knowledge. Despite the heterogeneity of their characteristics, however, a clear typology of the strategies used by traditional NPD service providers and web‐based intermediaries to interact with their knowledge sources and with their clients is missing. This typology would be very useful for those firms that are willing to collaborate with innovation intermediaries because it could highlight the typologies of NPD problems different intermediaries are apt to address and the managerial challenges that working with them entails. Developing such a classification framework is the main goal of this paper.The typology proposed in this paper suggests that innovation intermediaries should be distinguished based on the following: (1) the way they access their distributed knowledge sources and (2) the way they deliver value to their clients. By combining these two dimensions, four categories of innovation intermediaries are identified, which are named brokers, mediators, collectors and connectors. A multiple case study analysis involving four innovation intermediaries and 12 of their clients is presented in the paper. The analysis provides exploratory insights into (1) the typologies of NPD problems that each class of intermediaries addresses and (2) the managerial challenges that working with each of them entails. These preliminary findings call for further theoretical and empirical research into the complex interaction among innovation intermediaries, their dispersed sources of knowledge and their clients.

Systematization of Recurrent New Product Development Management Problems

:One of the ways to improve the New Product Development (NPD) process is to eliminate the problems that arise over years of practice. This article describes the systematization of recurrent NPD management problems. The main NPD problems were found to be recurrent; hence, the systematization resulting from this study allows for the identification of NPD areas requiring special attention from both practitioners and researchers. This identification enables researchers to define new areas of academic research, and practitioners to focus on specific improvement projects. Eight case studies were conducted, in which 124 NPD personnel were interviewed, involving the diagnosis of the NPD process and the identification and selection of NPD improvement projects. The diagnostic method applied was the Current Reality Tree (CRT), which is a cognitive method for identifying undesirable effects (problems) in a process. Text mining techniques were then applied to identify similarities among these CRTs. Lastly, NPD categories were created to classify the NPD problems. An analysis of the rate of problems per category underlined the importance of diagnosing the NPD process. It was concluded that process and project management are just as critical as product strategy definition and human resource management. Additionally, we concluded that companies would gain greater benefits by focusing on the aforementioned areas before investing in information and communication technology. Potential pitfalls of NPD may be avoided if companies adopt proactive management actions to mitigate their NPD recurrent problems based on the results presented here.

Multiobjective strategies for New Product Development in the pharmaceutical industry

New Product Development (NPD) constitutes a challenging problem in the pharmaceutical industry, due to the characteristics of the development pipeline. Formally, the NPD problem can be stated as follows: select a set of R&D projects from a pool of candidate projects in order to satisfy several criteria (economic profitability, time to market) while coping with the uncertain nature of the projects. More precisely, the recurrent key issues are to determine the projects to develop once target molecules have been identified, their order and the level of resources to assign. In this context, the proposed approach combines discrete event stochastic simulation (Monte Carlo approach) with multiobjective genetic algorithms (NSGAII type, Non-Sorted Genetic Algorithm II) to optimize the highly combinatorial portfolio management problem. In that context, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are particularly attractive for treating this kind of problem, due to their ability to directly lead to the so-called Pareto front and to account for the combinatorial aspect. This work is illustrated with a study case involving nine interdependent new product candidates targeting three diseases. An analysis is performed for this test bench on the different pairs of criteria both for the bi- and tricriteria optimization: large portfolios cause resource queues and delays time to launch and are eliminated by the bi- and tricriteria optimization strategy. The optimization strategy is thus interesting to detect the sequence candidates. Time is an important criterion to consider simultaneously with NPV and risk criteria. The order in which drugs are released in the pipeline is of great importance as with scheduling problems.

New Product Development with Discrete Event Simulation: Application to Portfolio Management for the Pharmaceutical Industry

New product development (NPD) constitutes a challenging problem in the pharmaceutical industry. Formally, the NPD problem can be stated as follows: Select a set of R&D projects from a pool of candidate projects to satisfy several criteria (e.g., economic profitability, time to market) while coping with the uncertain nature of the projects. More precisely, the recurrent key issues are to determine the projects to be developed, together with the order in which they enter the pipeline and the corresponding resource allocation. In this context, this work presents the development and implementation of a discrete event simulator for drug portfolio management based on object-oriented techniques and used as a tool for evaluating each drug or sequence of drugs. Evaluation methods based on bubble charts are used for selecting the best drugs according to the considered evaluation criteria. Imprecision modeling has been tackled in two ways: a classical probability approach and an interval-based one. Both approaches are illustrated by a numerical example, which shows that the tendencies obtained by the interval-based approach can be difficult to interpret for the decision maker, because of the growing uncertainty along the pipeline. In addition, the risk, which is taken into account through failure probability for some stages and which is strongly involved in the NPD process, must be an integral part of the modeling approach. The repetitive use of simulation with representative sampling turns out to be the most efficient strategy.

Development Resource Planning: Complexity of Product Development and the Capacity to Launch New Products

Overcommitment of development capacity or development resource deficiencies are important problems in new product development (NPD). Existing approaches to development resource planning have largely neglected the issue of resource magnitude required for NPD. This research aims to fill the void by developing a simple higher-level aggregate model based on an intuitive idea: The number of new product families that a firm can effectively undertake is bound by the complexity of its products or systems and the total amount of resources allocated to NPD. This study examines three manufacturing companies to verify the proposed model. The empirical results confirm the study's initial hypothesis: The more complex the product family, the smaller the number of product families that are launched per unit of revenue. Several suggestions and implications for managing NPD resources are discussed, such as how this study's model can establish an upper limit for the capacity to develop and launch new product families.

Vasa syndrome: Insights from a 17th-century new-product disaster

Executive Overview The Swedish ship Vasa was one of the most spectacular warships ever built. On its maiden voyage in August of 1628, after going less than one mile, the vessel keeled over and sank 110 feet to the bottom of the Stockholm harbor. Fifty crewmembers went down with the ship. It was truly a disaster—and an excellent example of a failure in the new-product development process. In this article, we show how insights gleaned from the Vasa incident are relevant to contemporary organizations. Seven potential problems in new-product development are examined. Together, these problems comprise the Vasa syndrome—a complex set of challenges that can ultimately overwhelm an organization's capabilities. Each problem provides an opportunity to develop managerial competencies in understanding these problem areas, linking these problems to failures described in the Vasa case and contemporary organizations, and determining how to avoid or minimize these problems in the new-product development process. The Vasa case and examples from contemporary organizations demonstrate how history continues to repeat itself in the process of new-product development, and we provide guidelines on how to avoid falling prey to the Vasa syndrome.

Market research companies and new product development tools

This research investigates (1) the share of new product development (NPD) research services in market research (MR) companies’ turnover, (2) MR companies’ awareness and use of NPD tools and the modifications made to these NPD tools, and (3) MR company managers’ perceptions of the influence of client use of commissioned NPD research on client NPD performance. The results from a sample of 35 Dutch and Belgium MR companies show that NPD research is a major growth area. MR companies mainly use qualitative research and focus on marketing‐mix and product optimization services. A moderate awareness and use of NPD tools exists, although major differences between tools exist. In over 75 percent of all cases MR companies have adjusted the NPD tools they use. Especially customization and standardization of the tools have taken place. Analyzing the relationship between the level of use of commissioned NPD research and client NPD performance, no significant main effect is found. However, a positive effect exists between the use of MR companies’ services and NPD performance for firms that specifically aim to solve NPD problems and/or increase their NPD success.

Optimization of industrial scale scheduling problems in new product development

This paper describes the optimization of the New Product Development process of DowElanco, an agricultural chemical company. It outlines how DowElanco created a model capturing the effects of four complications present in their New Product Development process. It reviews previous academic work on optimizing a New Product Development process, which has only addressed one of the four complications. An industrial scale, reproducible example is provided to demonstrate that when subject to the assumptions of the academic models, real world problems are more highly structured than randomly generated problems, which provides a computational advantage. This allows much larger problems to be optimized than had previously been reported.

Strategic Partnering for Developing New Products

A four-stage process can help management answer the questions it must answer when forming partnerships to develop new products. OVERVIEW: New product development (NPD) is becoming increasingly complex and costly. One consequence of this is that more companies are using various partnering arrangements to accomplish their innovative goals. This article presents process that can impact the important decisions relating to the successful development of new products by partners. NPD partnering is not discrete event but maturation process involving several stages including awareness, exploration, commitment, and dissolution. Issues that require consideration during this partnering process include identifying both the originating firm s needs and the partners needs, understanding the likely consequences of the relative size and capabilities of partners, and selecting the appropriate alliance strategy. The study of new product development (NPD) typically focuses on activities within single firm. Important exceptions include the work done by Urban and von Hippel in which they discuss employing new product ideas developed by customers as lead users (I) and the examination of large-scale RD (2) the increased reliance on corporate mergers and acquisitions to obtain growth via new products often creates problems of fit; (3) many firms neglect or perform important NPD activities poorly; and (4) even though innovative new products are identified by customers, suppliers and other outside organizations, such new product information is not heeded. We contend that these and other NPD problems are often amenable to partnering solutions. With innovation so important to most firms' survival (8), why don't some firms pursue new product development more actively? One explanation is that these firms lack the resources or personnel to carry out NPD activities. Although firms in this situation understand that they have significant NPD deficiencies, they may lack either the knowledge, capabilities and/or the desire to pursue corrective measures. Another problem relates to those firms that recognize they have NPD deficiencies and attempt to buy their way into new product arena. Such firms appear to either desire great deal of control over their NPD efforts or do not recognize alternative NPD options (e.g., partnering). Therefore, to enter market with new product, these companies choose either to merge with other organizations that are developing new products or to acquire other companies that have recently launched new products. These actions can solve NPD problems but they often create additional, more severe, challenges related to integrating new personnel, handling financial burdens, and redundant functional departments. A third NPD problem relates to firms that develop new products internally but ignore or poorly perform particular activities in their nominally sophisticated NPD processes. These firms either do not possess the requisite skills to achieve high level of proficiency in certain NPD tasks or else they are rushed by competitive pressures to speed up their NPD processes. In either case, these firms jeopardize their new product's success because a more complete new product process appears to make difference (6). An additional NPD problem is that many firms either do not develop new products or develop them poorly because they do not utilize important information and resources offered by external organizations such as customers and suppliers. …

Towards Global Textile/Apparel Development: Questionnaire Survey Analysis of Design Management in British Textile Enterprises

The purpose of this work is to throw new light upon the ‘ill-defined’ subject of design and its role in industrial competition. To this end the paper examines the attitudes of managers and project workers in British textile industrial companies towards the development of new products, and compares these attitudes with company performance in order to discover any significant relationships. The research is based on a cross-sectional survey of companies engaged in yarn, fabric, clothing and textile machinery design. It is an isochronous study which focuses upon the point where the four dimensions of ‘design’, ‘management’, ‘information’, and ‘computing’ meet. These dimensions are translated into three main research perspectives which focus upon three dynamic but interrelated aspects of new-product development (NPD): (1) key issues in NPD and major influences upon design, (2) priorities and problems in NPD, and (3) computing or information technology in NPD. ‘Key issues in NPD and major influences upon design...

The Practice of Product Testing in the New Product Development Process: The Role of Model‐Based Approaches

Examines the potential of predictive models in the product testing stage of new product development. Draws on experience gained from a series of interviews with senior managers in the marketing departments of advertising and market research agencies and manufacturers of fast‐moving goods in the confectionery industry. Aims to give insight into the practical problems and acceptability of such models. Identifies alternatives to the models by examining problems in new product development. Reveals that no standard approaches are common in the confectionery industry especially and suggests that evidence militates against the use of models in the product testing stage of new product development.