Why The Need For New Product Development
New product development (NPD) is a process that transforms technical ideas or market needs and opportunities into new product that is launched into the market. ... It involves managing people who have different backgrounds ranging from marketing to research and development (R&D) to manufacturing. ... NPD is a term used to capture a range of different types of innovative activities leading to the production of new service or product from innovation to simple modification to existing products. There are several factors that lead to the need for NPD : „« Customers needs Customers are the reason why organizations exist. ... „« Product lifecycle Based on the belief that most products go through similar sets of stages, from introduction into market place through to maturity and decline. NPD helps to extend the productˇ¦s life by rejuvenating the cycle. This is through the re-launching of the product with new packaging. ... Some reasons for product lifecycle to be shorter would be technology changes and increased sophistication of consumers „« Technology changes With technology breakthrough, it certainly changes customer demand and expectations. ... New Product Development Team Every person has different perspective on a particular thing, in the same way different functional departments within an organization may view a new product differently. ... „« Marketing People in the marketing function, emphasize in identifying what the potential customers expect to see in the finished product. Base on these requirements, the core product concept is shaped and is also translated into more specific product features to better communicate the productˇ¦s meaning to the team involved „« R&D The role of R&D is to address technological issues such as how technology is integrated within products to meet the needs of the market. This includes anticipating the technological problems faced when developing the new product and providing technology solutions. „« Manufacturing People from the manufacturing department explore ways to manufacture and assemble the new product in the shortest time available and with the least cost involved. At the same time, they need to incorporate product quality. With these different perspectives taken into considerations, the desired final product is developed. New Product Development Activities Due to the several factors as mentioned earlier, especially technology changes, which greatly affects our company, Nokia Singapore. ... This lead a need to develop an improved version, to replace this current model. Hence, the NPD team is gathered to plan to develop this new improved product. Idea Generation Having the idea of retaining the feature of integrated digital camera, the NPD team worked on how to further improve the product. ... Having identified the problems, the NPD team could brainstorm on possible solutions, this would ensure the new product would not suffer the same fate as the existing Nokia 7650. ... Having understand what consumers want, the NPD team could work on a product that the customers would buy. ... Screening and Evaluation It is not possible to develop a product that has all the features as mentioned due to time and resources constraints, hence screening of product ideas to select those important product ideas is important. ... Each product idea is ranked according to the level of importance.