Introduction
New product developments are one of the main sources of competitive advantage for companies today. Companies need new product to keep up with its’ competitors. New product development can be considered as activities that aim to bring new products to market.
The objective of NPD is to minimize the risk of failure. As NPD absorbs both financial and human resources from a company, it is therefore necessary to develop and implement a methodology for assisting in the introduction of new products.
NPD models can help to identify problems at an early stage and assist in directing the NPD effort in the right direction. It can be used as a roadmap and provides an indication of magnitude of the project required in order to develop and launch a new product. It also helps to reduce risk and uncertainty at every stage by giving guidance regarding what information is required. An example of well known model is Booz, Allen, and Hamilton Model (1982).
It has been argued that pass-the-parcel approach to NPD might extend the overall development time. However in more recent models, focus has been given to parallel-processing. The next section mentions about three model of NPD.
Cooper’s stage-gate model
A stage-gate model (Cooper, 1988) is improved from BAH model. The stage-gate model attempts to overcome pass-the-parcel issues which do not suitable for communicating the horizontal dimension of the NPD process. The stage-gate model uses parallel-processing to acknowledge the iterations between and within stages. The idea of parallel processing advises that major functions should be involved from the early stages of the NPD process to its conclusion. This allows problems to be detected and solved much earlier than in the classic models.
The idea of dividing the new product development process into distinct phases or stages is the same as BAH model, but in the stage