Sixteen Years of NPD Research

The first academic article in the May issue of Journal of Product Innovation Management is a review of 16 years of new product development aticles in leading NPD, R&D, Marketing and Management journals written by Albert L. Page of the University of Illinois at Chicago and me here at Radford U.

The main conclusion of interest for readers of this blog would simply be that despite the fact that services are 80% of the economy, little academic NPD research has focused on services. Furthermore the research that HAS been done on services has largely focused on how well NPD models developed for goods innovation fit service innovation.

It is also interesting to note that much of the academic research on NPD continues to focus on the effectiveness of process variables — such as the use of Stage-Gate(R) procedures  or multi-disciplinary teams — despite a meta-analysis (Henard & Szymanski 2001) that showed that process variables had little effect on NPD success compared to marketing variables such as meeting customer needs.

—–

This is my first academic publication (the tenure clock is ticking). It is frustrating to realize how much more effort such an article takes than my former articles for industry publications; while knowing that I will never get as much feedback as I did on an article such as the one I wrote for Futures Magazine a couple years ago on innovation in online trading systems.

But reading 16 years of research on NPD was probably a good way to launch my own life 2.0.