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A Compare and Contrast of the New Product Development Model

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Introduction
New product developments are one of the main sources of competitive advantage for companies today. Companies need new product to keep up with its’ competitors. New product development can be considered as activities that aim to bring new products to market.
The objective of NPD is to minimize the risk of failure. As NPD absorbs both financial and human resources from a company, it is therefore necessary to develop and implement a methodology for assisting in the introduction of new products.
NPD models can help to identify problems at an early stage and assist in directing the NPD effort in the right direction. It can be used as a roadmap and provides an indication of magnitude of the project required in order to develop …show more content…

Stages are cross functional and each activity is undertaken in parallel to enhance speed to market. To manage risk, the parallel activities in a certain stage must be designed to gather vital information – technical, market, financial, operations – in order to drive down the technical and business risk. Each successive stage is also more costly than previous stage. The idea is to allow an increase in spending on the development of projects as the uncertainty goes down. Preceding each stage is a decision point or gate which serves as a go/kill and prioritization decision point.
The advantages of the stage-gate are following:
- Well organized innovation can be a source of competitive advantage.
- Accelerated product development. Necessary because of shortening product life cycles.
- Increased success chance of new products. Prevents poor projects early and helps to redirect them
- Integrated market orientation.
Multiple convergent model
The multiple convergent model (Baker and Hart, 1994) follows parallel processing – like the stage-gate model - which allows iterations among participants within stages. However, there are two problems with parallel processing. First, it ignores the important inputs to NPD that are provided by customers and suppliers. Second, if functions are to work in parallel then when do the processes take decisions and move on to the next stage?
The multiple convergent model overcomes the issue by

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