Product development practices have evolved over recent years as product cost, quality and time-to-market have each become progressively important. In parallel, the rapid pace of technology development has led to shorter product life cycles for many product categories, most notably in consumer electronics. Whereas in previous years, the technology development, product development and transfer to volume production for a typical product might have occurred in several phases spread over 10–15 years, now it is common for the same processes to take no more than 2–5 years. This paper charts the evolution of the product development process within a major multinational company with reference to three consumer electronic products from different periods. It is suggested that as the NPD process comes under increasing time pressure, there appears to be a paradigm shift in the way that the development and transition to volume manufacture of such products needs to be managed.

Keywords: NPD; Fast product development process; Market dynamics; Distributed innovation; Time to market; Product quality