Study On New Pharmaceutical Product Selection And Prioritization System

New product development (NPD) is essential to a pharmaceutical company to maintain its competitive advantage and grow up continuously. Enterprise's competitive and survival capabilities are very much rely on the development of new products and their future sales after launch. The new product selection, evaluation and decision making process are critical to ensure the success of new product development. Domestic companies have less experience on project selection and evaluation compared with foreign companies. The new product development practice in most of our domestic companies is lack of the guidance of relative theories and methodology. The importance of NPD is not clearly realized by the management. The evaluation team has poor knowledge and skills to evaluate the projects. The evaluation system is not complete and the process management is not professional. Therefore, the evaluation work is not stable, consistent and scientific. The performance of NPD is not satisfactory. This article is aimed to help the Chinese pharmaceutical companies to establish a complete new product selection and prioritization system to improve their performance of NPD and accomplish the cooperate strategy.This article is based on the deep study of different evaluation theories, methodologies and a great amount of domestic and international publications. New product development practice in dozens of domestic and joint venture are investigated. Combining theories with the author's over 15- year experience on marketing and new product development in pharmaceutical industry, using qualitative and quantitative project evaluation and logistic analysis methods, this article suggests an integrated selection and prioritization system for new pharmaceutical projects.After reviewing the achievement of former studies and research, and considering the characteristics of pharmaceutical industry, this article explains a detailed structure of the selection and prioritization system for new pharmaceutical projects, including the subject, object, target, criterion and procedure systems. Targeting at the deficiency of current studies which are mainly focus on the model design and selection of criteria, this article emphasizes more on structure of the system and the evaluation of its long term efficacy. Another important part in this paper is how to manage the procedure and the team to ensure the system to go smoothly. The new product selection and prioritization system suggested in this article is very operative. It provides a clear guidance and method to the new product development practice for the pharmaceutical manufacturers.