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This paper is a review of research in product development, which we define as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. Our review is broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this breadth is in conveying the shape of the entire research landscape. We focus on product development projects within a single firm. We also devote our attention to the development of physical goods, although much of the work we describe applies to products of all kinds. We look inside the "black box" of product development at the fundamental decisions that are made by intention or default. In doing so, we adopt the perspective of product development as a deliberate business process involving hundreds of decisions, many of which can be usefully supported by knowledge and tools. We contrast this approach to prior reviews of the literature, which tend to examine the importance of environmental and contextual variables, such as market growth rate, the competitive environment, or the level of top-management support.
(Product Development Decisions; Survey; Literature Review)
1. Introduction and Scope
This paper is a review of research design and development. We define product development as the transformation of a market opportunity and a set of assumptions about product technology into a product available for sale. Our review is deliberately broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this breadth is in conveying the shape of the entire research landscape. The review is intended primarily for two audiences. First, we hope to benefit new researchers entering the field of product development (e.g., doctoral students). We also hope this review will be valuable to experienced researchers who are interested in learning about the range of research in product development, perhaps to identify new research opportunities or to locate issues that intersect their current interests.
Despite the broad scope, we limit the review in several ways. We focus on product development projects within a single firm. This focus is in contrast to much of the literature on technological innovation, which addresses innovation at the level of an entire industry or an entire firm (e.g., Abernathy and Utterback 1978, Utterback 1994). We...