New Product Development Strategy: Aligning Process with Context

FEATURE ARTICLE

Do You Need a New Product-Development Strategy?
Aligning Process With Context
There is no one-size-fits-all product-development process; designing new products for different business contexts requires different new-product development processes.
Alan MacCormack, William Crandall, Paul Henderson, and Peter Toft

OVERVIEW: Many firms rely on a single new-product development process for all projects. But designing new products for different business contexts requires that a firm deploy different new-product development processes. Products designed for stable and mature end-user markets require a process optimized for control and efficiency. In contrast, first-of-a-kind "breakthrough" products require a more emergent process that aims to discover whether there is any market to be served in the first place. Applying a uniform "best-practice" process to all development efforts ignores the major differences between these projects and may result in missed opportunities. This article describes a framework to address this problem, allowing a firm to better align the design of its development processes to the specific aims of individual projects. We illustrate this framework with examples from Hewlett-Packard, a large, diversified electronics firm that has successfully piloted this new approach across multiple business units, KEYWORDS: Product development. Process design, Stage-Gate® processes, Agile development processes

Over the past decade, firms have invested millions of dollars to define and standardize the way they bring new products and services to market. Despite these investments, however, studies of new product success rates have shown little or no improvement (Griffin 1997; Adams and Boike 2004), Indeed, recent data suggest that firms

struggle more than ever to develop and launch new products on time with acceptable features, cost, and quality (Christensen 1997), And remarkably, some of these firms blame the very processes designed to

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