A Field Research Study Exploring the Relationships among Factors in new Product Development and the Success of New Products

While considerable research has been undertaken to study how technical factors, marketing factors and formal NPD structures and processes affect new product success, little if any research exists which relates the role of accounting and finance NPD members and their expertise, or the use of financial measures, to new product success. This field research study uses in-person interviews and a detailed, structured interview protocol to gather both quantitative data and responses to open questions. The preliminary results confirm earlier findings on the importance of technical factors (technical personnel and expertise) and marketing factors (marketing personnel and expertise) to new product success. It also confirms that the multifunctional team structure was used for all NPD teams, and that all NPD projects used a formal, multistage process. Moving beyond findings that confirm earlier research, we further find that successful projects are more likely to use outwardly focused, market oriented metrics like profit margin, sales, and sales growth whereas less successful projects were more inwardly focused, comparing development cost to budget. In addition, while the timing of th

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