Centre for Technology Management

Speeding new products to market:

- a practical workbook for achieving more successful new product development and introduction

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Background

"Speeding new products to market" is a workbook that provides practical steps for assessing and improving an organisation's New Product Introduction (NPI) processes. It is founded on the observation that attempts to improve product development and introduction are likely to be unnecessarily disruptive and inefficient without a thorough understanding of current activities and future aspirations.

The workbook takes both 'hard' and 'soft' approaches to assessment. Certain aspects of product development can be measured with some objectively, such as the returns on recent project expenditures, and the duration and timeliness of recent project activities. Others are measurable but based mostly on subjective perceptions, such as the degree of co-operation between departments, and the extent to which a new design has followed a stable development process. The involvement of everyone influencing new products in a company is an important element of the assessment approach.

The workbook provides a process for assessing NPI in a short timescale and a set of tools that can be understood and implemented by company management. One focus of the process is to limit the amount of effort that is required to carry out the assessments.

This book is the final output of the project "New Product Introduction in SMEs: Audit, Analysis and Improvement" funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).