Changing the New Product Development Process : Reengineering or Continuous Quality Improvement?

Organizations are changing their new product development processes in order to introduce improvements to innovation performance. The purpose of this study is two‐fold. First, we wish to characterize the change process to examine whether the approach taken represents reengineering, or continuous quality improvement. Second, we wish to compare the process of change to an ideal model of change, and see how closely practice followed theory. Case studies of six companies are developed from interviews of executives, reengineering team members, and other organizational members. The actual change process tended to consist of components of both reengineering and continuous quality improvement, and there were some significant gaps between practice and theory.