Ankush Agrawal - Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Nadia Bhuiyan - Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

The literature emphasizes the great importance of new product development (NPD) for the continuing success of a business. Its contribution to the growth of companies, its influence on profit performance, and its role as a key factor in business planning have been well documented. The competitive environment in which new products are marketed is undergoing fundamental changes. These changes are the key factors driving the NPD activities in service and manufacturing industries. New product development has been an important managerial issue for many firms as the number of new products marketed has grown and product life cycles have shortened. Therefore, the study of NPD and the processes through which they emerge is important. In recent years, much research has been directed towards uncovering the secrets to new product success. Organizations are looking for a steady stream of successful and profitable new products. The challenge is to successfully manage the development of the product from research and development to market launch. Despite the extensive research on how to achieve success in NPD, firms continue to deliver products that fail and therefore NPD ranks among the riskiest and most challenging tasks for most companies. As the number of dollars invested in NPD goes up, the pressure to maximize the return on those investments also goes up. It becomes worse as estimated 46 percent of all the resources allocated to NPD by firms are spent on products that are canceled or fail to yield an adequate financial return. This is a shocking statistic when one considers the magnitude of human and financial resources invested and wasted. This paper explores and analyzes the NPD process in detail. The focus is to develop a framework that identifies the critical success factors (CSF) of each phase in the NPD process, and proposes metrics to measure them. Furthermore, the tools and techniques that can be used to evaluate each metric forms an integral part of this framework.

New Product Development (NPD), Critical Success Factor (CSF), Tools & Techniques, Metrics