Critical success factors and risk mitigation strategy for new product development

”Success in new product development (NPD) offers a competitive and comparative advantage in the marketplace. A primary objective in an NPD project is to launch world class products with minimal risk. To deliver the superior quality and performance customers require, a company must develop the right NPD structure and framework for seamless execution by the NPD project teams throughout the product lifecycle. Companies must understand how to identify and mitigate risk to enable the success of their NPD projects. The costs to develop new products are often a considerable portion of an organization’s budget; however, studies have shown only 60 percent of new products making it to the market are commercially successful. Therefore, NPD project teams need to have a risk mitigation strategy, methodology, or framework to help with the identification and mitigation of risks in the product development process. This research conducted a systematic literature review to document the current research in the development of a risk mitigation framework tied to critical success factors (CSFs) that can be applied in the NPD process. The purpose of this research was to 1) determine the top CSFs that enable successful NPD through a worldwide multi-industry survey and 2) develop an NPD framework to mitigate risk. The survey responses were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric statistical analysis to determine statistical differences in the CSFs based on rank. The top CSFs were then grouped to provide a conceptual highlevel view for managers to consider when developing or continuously improving their NPD execution structure, methods, and processes. An NPD framework was proposed based on the CSFs in order to mitigate risk”--Abstract, page iv