| The New Product Development (NPD) process has come to be regarded seriously as a means to gain competitive advantage only since the late 1980s. Numerous practitioners have developed prescriptions to improve the manageability and predictability of the NPD process and outcomes. A large number of empirical studies have also found complex relationships between NPD process activities and outcomes. However, the lack of a unified conceptual NPD framework and a corresponding comprehensive self-assessment instrument has made it difficult to consistently identify and apply these findings in practical situations, to track their effectiveness and results over time, and to compare studies in order to identify generalizable patterns. This research provides a sound unified NPD framework upon which future research efforts can be coordinated. It also enhances design theory by explicitly decoupling process excellence, process maturity and process outcomes, and by defining the best practices in these areas to a detailed and practical level. A practice-oriented approach based on a wide range of sources (grounded theory) makes it possible to articulate a research framework with explicit propositional links between excellence, maturity and outcomes. Subsequently, the framework is tested and corroborated through survey research (sampling logic) and case study corroboration (replication logic), representing a ‘triangulation’ approach in which the framework has been validated by three independent methods. This framework should enable the coordination of ongoing efforts to further characterize the NPD process. Also, this research provides a theoretically sound and empirically tested self-assessment instrument using which companies can diagnose shortcomings in their NPD and track improvements on a continuing basis. Finally, the research identifies some general guidance for practitioners; primarily, that ‘doing the right things’ (i.e. selecting the right projects), followed by ‘doing them right’ (i.e. concurrent engineering, project management, etc.) represents a recipe for NPD success. ‘You get what you measure’, especially cycle time improvement. ‘Boundary activities’ are important and factors may require tradeoffs between outcomes. Since practices change over time, future research should include values-based NPD constructs in addition to practice-based constructs, in an attempt to make the instrument more enduring. |
