When it comes to new product development many managers spend their entire careers using a single style of development without realising that many other choices exist – in addition many companies have standardised their processes, removing the option from managers to design or choose something more appropriate for their project.

This article, Do you need a new product-development strategy? published in Research Technology Management, reports that there is no such thing as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ product development process and that applying a uniform ‘best practice’ process may result in missed opportunities.

The authors report that firms often fail to align product-development strategy to business needs and outline a framework to address this problem.

The framework is illustrated with examples from electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, which has successfully piloted the new approach across many areas of its business. The company competes in a variety of contexts and the company has learnt to adapt its development strategy to fit these different markets – this helps their managers chose the development style most suited to their business needs.

The article aims to show R&D managers how, learning from HP’s experiences, they can become more adept at understanding what their own business context requires from product development and assessing how they need to adapt in order to deliver their objectives.

The authors say that by managers being proactive and driving these changes explicitly they can systematically improve the responsiveness of their innovation processes and help their companies to outperform competitors still caught in the ‘best practice’ trap.

Read the full paper:

Do You Need a New Product Development Strategy?, Alan MacCormack, William Crandall, Paul Henderson and Peter Toft, Research Technology Management, 2015

Recommended by Anita Friis Sommer, post by R&D Today Admin