Talk:New product development/Archives/2014

Scope of the article

The scope of the article seems to be a bit like an overview of material from a university course in Marketing, and seems to be assuming a particular kind of consumer product. New Product Development is actually a substantially broader process than we are currently reflecting in the article. It applies to a much wider array of new products than merely consumer products (e.g., heavy equipment, launch vehicles, underwater gliders, 3D printers for buildings, etc.) and includes a large amount of technical and engineering processes to get the mechanics, electrical/electronics, software, etc. all architected, designed, implemented and unit tested.

The marketing centric view of the current article (see, for example, the Eight stages sections) misses a good deal of the technical/engineering stages of NPD, and overemphasizes consumer products. N2e (talk) 12:44, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I've finally found some time and have started to clean up the article. I'll do more in the coming weeks, but would be happy for input from other editors and of course others will also help improve the article. Major problems I see include insufficient breadth (as mentioned above), especially in covering the engineering and technical aspects of NPD; prose style that is often more like an academic paper rather than an encyclopedia; and insufficient references so readers can confirm where various statements are supported/verifiable. N2e (talk) 14:11, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Question about Engineering vs Development

I know from experience that product developers are usually peers of engineers if not superiors. However, the way that software engineering is being redefined on wikipedia by user Mdd, it would sound as if anyone involved in developing software would be a subordinate of an engineer in software development. Is this an accepted norm in software product development or any other related field that uses the term product development? Oicumayberight (talk) 03:29, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

No. In several large corporations and startups I worked in during 1989-2005, the software engineers were typically organized such that engineers and software engineers were in equivalent departments, or sometimes within a single department, but there was generally no particular hierarchy that one outranked the other. Moreover, I've seen people from both groups be promoted to managers, and those managers may have either or both under their supervision. Cheers. N2e (talk) 02:07, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Development of the first part of the article 'eight stages'

I've found this article quite useful but I'm struggling with the idea of 'eight stages process of koen'... and the lack of references for this section. Koen himself [Koen et al. (2001). Providing Clarity... p.49] (presume the reference relates to Peter Koen??) divides NPD into the front end of innovation (FEI) and new product process development (NPPD) or stage-gate theory. Seeing as stage-gate theory classically is described with 5 stages, [Cooper (1991). New Product Processes... p.38] I'm a little confused as to where these eight stages are derived from... cheers Thomas Friar (talk) 15:45, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

I concur with you. I have been unable to find what sources support the rather detailed description of "the eight stages". I suspect that many of the requests for citations were added by me. I'm waiting to see if any editor happens along who can, and is willing to do the work, to source all those statements. If not, I would expect that they will eventually be removed from the encyclopedia.

A second, related, concern is that—assuming sources are found from a paper or book for the eight stages—what is the appropriate level of detail that ought to be placed into an article of this scope, to cover the details of one particular marketing approach to new product development? I don't know the answer, but will suggest it is an area for us to deal with as we endeavor to improve the article. Cheers. N2e (talk) 02:13, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. Definitely agree - there's a lot of detail for what is a non-verified process. I am currently involved with research on npd as part of my final year project for my degree, so I may be able to provide more detail as I progress with my reading - thanks Thomas Friar (talk) 10:45, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Cool, if you get to places in your tech literature on the subject where this is discussed, please do come back and write up what can be supported, and add a source for it. If you need help, I've been editing Wikipedia for some time now, and could help you learn to write up a good source citation for the material you find, and help you abstract the essential guts of it out, as that is all that an encyclopedia should have on most topics from any one source. Good luck with finishing your degree. N2e (talk) 17:36, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

It appears that the model published by Booz, Allen and Hamilton in 1982(New products management for the 1980s)is still the best known process and it appears to comprise the steps of all the other models proposed afterwards. This process comprises seven stages and the first six represent the Fuzzy Front-End (new product strategy, idea generation, screening and evaluation, business analysis, development, and testing). The last stage, commercialisation, represent the fuzzy back end of the innovation. -NOTE: this section can be very subjective because valuable models or improvements have been published afterwards. It just simply depends on the firm's capabilities (in terms of employee experience, technology available...) and the new product type. This is where some help from a company such as IDEO would be very handy. IDEO's process have been also very discussed and analysed, their five step process is now taught in universities. This subject is very wide, but is very well researched in the literature. Regards, Adrian — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.125.14.98 (talk) 23:19, 14 August 2014 (UTC)