New Product Development

Abstract

The innovation process may be divided into three areas: the fuzzy front end (FFE), the new product development (NPD) process, and commercialization, as indicated in Figure 1-1. 1 The first part-the FFE-is generally regarded as one of the greatest opportunities for improvement of the overall innovation process.2 Many companies have dramatically improved cycle time and efficiency by implementing a formal Stage-Gate TM (Cooper 1993) or PACE᭨ (McGrath and Akiyama 1996) approach for managing projects in the NPD portion of the innovation process. Attention is increasingly being focused on the front-end activities that precede this formal and structured process in order to increase the value, amount, and success probability of high-profit concepts entering product development and commercialization.The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with the most effective methods, tools, and techniques for managing the FFE. 3 The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the literature and the rationale for developing the new concept development (NCD) model. The next section describes the NCD model. The remaining sections provide a description of the most effective methods, tools, and techniques to be used in each part of the NCD model.