Product development professionals may have the feeling that yet another buzzword or magic bullet always lurks just around the corner. However, researchers have devoted considerable effort to helping practioners determine which tools, techniques, and methods really do offer a competitive edge. Starting 30 years ago, research efforts have aimed at understanding NPD practices and identifying those which are deemed “best practices.” During the past five years, pursuit of this goal has produced numerous privately available reports and two research efforts sponsored by the PDMA. Abbie Griffin summarizes the results of research efforts undertaken during the past five years and presents findings from the most recent PDMA survey on NPD best practices. This survey, conducted slightly more than five years after PDMA's first best‐practices survey, updates trends in processes, organizations, and outcomes for NPD in the U.S., and determines which practices are more commonly associated with firms that are more successsful in developing new products. The survey has the following objectives: determining the current status of NPD practices and performance; understanding how product development has changed from five years ago; determining whether NPD practice and performance differ across industry segments; and, investigating process and product development tools that differentiate product development success. The survey findings indicate that NPD processes continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. NPD changes continually on multiple fronts, and firms that fail to keep their NPD practices up to date will suffer an increasingly marked competitive disadvantage. Interestingly, although more than half of the respondents use a cross‐functional stage‐gate process for NPD, more than one‐third of all firms in the study still use no formal process for managing NPD. The findings suggest that firms are not adequately handling the issue of team‐based rewards. Project‐completion dinners are for the most frequently used NPD reward; they are also the only reward used more by best‐practice firms than by the rest of the respondents. The best‐practice firms participating in the study do not use financial rewards for NPD. Compared to the other firms in the study, best‐practice firms use more multifunctional teams, are more likely to measure NPD processes and outcomes, and expect more from their NPD programs.

In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the “voice of the customer” is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first “house” of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the “Voice-of-the-Customer” component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs. In the stage, we address the questions of (1) how many customers need be interviewed, (2) how many analysts need to read the transcripts, (3) how many customer needs do we miss, and (4) are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus (affinity) charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, . Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs. We close with a brief application to illustrate how a product-development team used the voice of the customer to create a successful new product.new product research, product policy, measurement

The trend toward leaner, flatter organizations enhances the need for communication and cooperation between the marketing and the R&D functions. This paper reviews evidence of the need for integrative communication and cooperation, research on the barriers to integration, and extant models to study integration. We summarize this research and these models with a causal map to organize research on integration at the new-product project-level. Within this framework we review research on the methods that managers can (and are) using to achieve functional integration between marketing and R&D. These actions include relocation and physical facilities design, personnel movement, informal social systems, organizational structures, incentives and rewards, and formal integrative management processes. For each action we summarize evidence to date and propose researchable hypotheses.To succeed in today's marketplace, most corporations must engender cooperation between the marketing and R&D (Research and Development) functions.It was not always so. In earlier eras expertise could be centralized in a single person who knew (or developed) the product technology, production process, and means to market goods to others. For example, a blacksmith knew where to get raw materials, how to maintain the forge fire, and how to shape metal. Customers sought out the blacksmith and explained their needs. He asked the questions required to understand their needs and made the product, developing new features and production techniques to meet any special conditions as he went along. If he did these tasks well, he lived well. If he failed at any of these tasks, he starved. The marketing and R&D functions were integrated in the activities of the blacksmith. Market feedback was quick, obvious, and persuasive.Even today in entrepreneurial firms, the producer-inventor frequently combines the knowledge of what is needed with how to develop it. But as the firm grows, the marketing and R&D functions become specialized. Scientists are hired to maintain and develop technology; marketing specialists are hired to sell the product, talk to customers, and communicate product benefits. Over time these groups grow apart, each expert at their own function, but less aware of the other's contribution. As integration and communication between these critical functions decreases, their ability to combine skills to develop and produce successful products decreases. The firm suffers.Marketing and R&D both provide input to many tasks. Some are core tasks upon which the success of the enterprise rests. For example, marketing and R&D share responsibilities for setting new-product goals, identifying opportunities for the next generation of product improvement, resolving engineering-design and customer-need tradeoffs, and understanding customer needs. These responsibilities require cooperation throughout the entire task and the combined expertise of both functional groups. Other tasks are dominated by one or the other group. For example, marketing often has domin...

I nnovation is one of the most important issues in business research today. It has been studied in many independent research traditions. Our understanding and study of innovation can benefit from an integrative review of these research traditions. In so doing, we identify 16 topics relevant to marketing science, which we classify under five research fields: • Consumer response to innovation, including attempts to measure consumer innovativeness, models of new product growth, and recent ideas on network externalities; • Organizations and innovation, which are increasingly important as product development becomes more complex and tools more effective but demanding; • Market entry strategies, which includes recent research on technology revolution, extensive marketing science research on strategies for entry, and issues of portfolio management; • Prescriptive techniques for product development processes, which have been transformed through global pressures, increasingly accurate customer input, Web-based communication for dispersed and global product design, and new tools for dealing with complexity over time and across product lines; • Defending against market entry and capturing the rewards of innovating, which includes extensive marketing science research on strategies of defense, managing through metrics, and rewards to entrants. For each topic, we summarize key concepts and highlight research challenges. For prescriptive research topics, we also review current thinking and applications. For descriptive topics, we review key findings.

Since 1990, the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) has sponsored best practice research projects to identify trends in new product development (NPD) management practices and to discern which practices are associated with higher degrees of success. The objective of this ongoing research is to assist managers in determining how to improve their own product development methods and practices. This paper presents results, recommendations, and implications for NPD practice stemming from PDMA's third best practices study, which was conducted in 2003. In the eight years since the previous best practices study was conducted, firms have become slightly more conservative in the portfolio of projects, with lower percentages of the total number of projects in the new-to-the-world and new-to-the-firm categories. Although success rates and development efficiencies have remained stable, this more conservative approach to NPD seems to have negatively impacted the sales and profits impact of the new products that have been commercialized. As formal processes for NPD are now the norm, attention is moving to managing the multiple projects across the portfolio in a more orchestrated manner. Finally, firms are implementing a wide variety of software support tools for various aspects of NPD. NPD areas still seriously in need of improved management include idea management, project leadership and training, cross-functional training and team communication support, and innovation support and leadership by management. In terms of aspects of NPD management that differentiate the ''best from the rest,'' the findings indicate that the best firms emphasize and integrate their innovation strategy across all the levels of the firm, better support their people and team communications, conduct extensive experimentation, and use numerous kinds of new methods and techniques to support NPD. All companies appear to continue to struggle with the recording of ideas and making them readily available to others in the organization, even the best. What remains unclear is whether there is a preferable approach for organizing the NPD endeavor, as no one organizational approach distinguished top NPD performers.