A universal new product development and upgradation framework

When confronted with new product development (NPD), managers generally adopt quick fixes such as benchmarking with competing products and then attempting incremental changes over the competitors’ product features. There are several approaches propounded in the past. Some focus on manufacturing, some on marketing and perception, and some on idea generation and stage-gating these concepts. However, a comprehensive approach seems to be missing. This paper attempts to suggest a comprehensive framework that could be used for products as well as services, by start-ups and conglomerates alike, for processes as well as organization design. This study includes an analysis of existing literature on NPD and an exploratory activity to identify all possible attributes of a product or service. The exploratory study was conducted with multiple groups of participants. Each group was given a different product or a service for analysis. They were asked to brainstorm in a systematic manner and list down everything that they liked/disliked or had suggestions about the product or service that they were analyzing. A comprehensive master-list of these attributes was then created to form the framework. An exhaustive list of forty-five attributes was compiled. These attributes are representatives of the latent needs and aspirations of consumers and can be used as a starting point of any new product or service development/upgradation process. This framework is equally applicable for processes and organizational design as it is for products and services. It can be used by managers in large as well as small organizations. It can also be used by faculty in management schools who teach Innovation and NPD as also faculty in a design school. The proposed framework can be used while designing systems for community-building too.