Role of R&D Practices for Effective Product Development Process in NPD

Introduction

New product development (NPD) is an essential activity each firm be involved to guarantee success and survival in competitive market environment (Sholeh et al., 2018). Globalization brings the world in a single platform and widens the scope of selecting the products as per the requirements and choice of end-users. This enforces the firms to develop new products by optimal utilization of available resources (Roy et al., 2018). SME sector is the backbone of Indian economy by contributing almost 6.11% of manufacturing GDP (www.cii.in). It provides resilience to economic adversities and protract in global competition. This evinces the necessity of NPD activities in SMEs for sustaining in dynamic manufacturing environment by producing innovative concepts and strategies for future growth (Roy et al., 2018). NPD success is a very rare target to be attained due to associated high costs, requirement of updated knowledgebase about customers’ demand, adoption of state-of-the-art technologies and sound experience on NPD activities for fulfilment of NPD objectives (Largosen, 2005).Though involvement in NPD activities and setting policies for success increases in all types of industries, NPD effort somehow fails at the final stage due to lack of systematic approach from the early stage of development (Florén et al., 2018). NPD is a series of activities every firm involves for developing new products (Bhuiyan, 2011). It consists of seven stages from strategy development followed by generation of initial ideas, screening and evaluation of those developed ideas, design and development evolves structuring of the developed idea into a product that is producible, testing and finally the commercialization (Booz et al., 1982). Control of various parameters on NPD activities during the development process is well-noticed. Role of these parameters are critically vital and must be taken care of for successful completion of NPD process. These parameters or constituents are famously known as critical success factors (CSFs) (Ernst, 2002). Previous researchers have signified the vitality of various CSFs for successful NPD. Identification of these factors is not enough, but realization of their beneficial role and their optimal utilization in practical field is equally matter of high concern to avoid the organizational failure (Rockart, 1979). Success of the firm is not elusive; it can be defined by various dimensions like financial and economic performance, customer acceptance, technological developments, quality aspects and time based measures (Huang et al., 2004). These success measures are crucial for measuring firm’s NPD performance in turn firm’s success.