Improving the New Product Development Process: A Fractal Paradigm for High‐Technology Products

Abstract

Those professionals who are charged with improving the new product development (NPD) process may well feel as though they have been asked to bring order out of chaos. For every level in the organization, and for every step in the NPD process, they must contend with myriad, often interdependent choices—of products and processes; of tools and technologies; of proven best practices and hypothesized solutions. In turn, each choice may cascade into several additional decisions. With so many issues to address and so many variables to consider, practioners and researchers alike need a clear, but complete, framework for exploring, understanding, and improving the NPD process. To help bring some order to the study and the practice of NPD management, W. Austin Spivey, J. Michael Munson, and John H. Wolcott introduce a new metaphor, or paradigm, for product development: a fractal paradigm. Like some fractal images, their framework for understanding the essence of NPD rests on the concept of self‐similarity. In other words, the picture their framework provides for understanding and managing the NPD process consists of the same set of concerns, regardless of the level at which the process is viewed. They developed this fractal paradigm during an empirical study of technology transition in a highly successful federal laboratory organization. Whether the focus is on the organization, the division, the team, or the individual, the essence of the NPD process as viewed through their framework comes down to two sets of factors: management factors and resource factors. In turn, each of these factors cascades into several interrelated sets of concerns. For example, the management factors comprise concerns about leadership and the management system. The resource factors include concerns about information, infrastructure, time, and money. Regardless of the level of detail at which the framework is viewed, improving the NPD process requires attention to all of these factors, by all levels within the organization. For example, visionary leadership on the part of senior management will have little effect if middle management and line supervisors fail to provide the necessary leadership for their respective groups of subordinates. Notwithstanding the complexity of the NPD process, the fractal paradigm focuses attention on those few key factors that must be managed continually, throughout all levels of the organization, to ensure successful commercialization of new products.

Managerial Factors Influencing Success of New Product Development

“…Different studies have been done in the past two decades on identifying critical success or failure factors of NPD with different methodologies (e.g., Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1995;Spivey et al, 1997;Montoya-Weiss and Calantone, 1994;Cooper and Edgett, 2006;Holland et al, 2000;Ebrahimi et al, 2006;Sun and Wing, 2005;Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 2007;Lim et al, 2003), discovered various factors, and achieved diverse outcomes; however, valuable but sometimes conflicting, or even contradictory with the results of other studies (Afonso et al, 2008). Moreover, there are some studies (e.g., Ernst, 2002) which present a review of other studies in the field of NPD.…”

“…In the last few decades, a large number of studies have been dedicated to study new product management and critical success factors of NPD (Balachandra and Friar, 1997;Spivey et al, 1997). In this research, we scaled down the scope of our study to one of the most important categories of critical success factors of NPD that points to the approaches of TMT, their orientations and characteristics.…”

Procedural Justice Climate in New Product Development Teams: Antecedents and Consequences

“…Tsui et al (2006) identified and operationalized those values as employee orientation, customer orientation, systematic management control, innovativeness orientation, and social responsibility in an organization. These values also represent the team culture values in an NPD project context, because NPD team culture values are an isomorphic view of organizational culture values (Weiss, 1993) and because NPD teams represents a microcosm of the parent organization (Spivey, Munson, and Wolcott, 1997).…”

The empirical relationship between quality management and the speed of new product development

“…He extracted 12 common denominators of successful new product projects and seven possible reasons (blockers) offered by managers for why the success factors are invisible and why projects seem to go wrong, or aren't well carried out. There are other studies on CSF or drivers for NPD (Balachandra & Friar, 1997;Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1995;Spivey, Munson, & Wolcott, 1997), which are all different.…”

“…When teams function properly, they become the glue that binds to bring impacts on customer satisfaction: user needs, technology base, material, manufacturing capability, support capabilities and so on. Successful teams overcome the shortcomings of hierarchical structures and generate quality decisions (Spivey et al, 1997). Henke, Karchenberg, and Lyons (1993) emphasise that the key discriminators are not the way the team is managed, but the decision-making process used by the team.…”