Product Development Decisions: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

T his paper is a review of research in product development, which we define as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. Our review is broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this breadth is in conveying the shape of the entire research landscape. We focus on product development projects within a single firm. We also devote our attention to the development of physical goods, although much of the work we describe applies to products of all kinds. We look inside the "black box" of product development at the fundamental decisions that are made by intention or default. In doing so, we adopt the perspective of product development as a deliberate business process involving hundreds of decisions, many of which can be usefully supported by knowledge and tools. We contrast this approach to prior reviews of the literature, which tend to examine the importance of environmental and contextual variables, such as market growth rate, the competitive environment, or the level of top-management support.

On firms’ product space evolution: the role of firm and local product relatedness

“…Finally, firms active in international markets may be more likely to innovate, as trade can be regarded as the flow of extra-regional knowledge (Boschma and Iammarino, 2009). On the one hand, importers may access new, better quality and more suitable inputs (Krishnan and Ulrich, 2001;Goldberg et al, 2009;Colantone and Crino`, 2014). On the other hand, exporters may dramatically be pushed to innovate by their own foreign customers (Egan and Mody, 1992;Goh, 2005;Salomon and Shaver, 2005;Baldwin and von Hippel, 2011;Hahn and Park, 2011;Bratti and Felice, 2012;Lo Turco and Maggioni, 2015).…”

Product Line Selection and Pricing with Modularity in Design

“…Our paper allows an arbitrary number of products (a broad product line), which enables us to directly examine the power of modularity. See Ho and Tang (1998), Krishnan and Ulrich (2001), and Ramdas (2003) for reviews of the product variety and development literature.…”

R&D partnership portfolios and the inflow of technological knowledge

“…This portfolio argument echoes insights provided by the literature on parallel search in research and development projects (Abernathy & Rosenbloom, 1969;Childs & Triantis, 1999;Krishnan & Ulrich, 2001;Nelson, 1961). These studies have compared the 'classic' sequential project selection model to a parallel search approach.…”