Best practices in product development

Best practices must be built into your product development process. Cooper's studies show that a product development process without these best practices has no positive impact on new product performance. So be sure to know exactly what the best practices are and how to integrate them in your development process.

Free articles for download

Article 1) Uncovering the best practices
This first article gives a good overview of best practices including:

	What distinguishes the winning product development projects?
	What distinguishes high performance companies?
	Advice on benchmarking and re-engineering new product development

Article 2) Benchmarking case
The second article explains via a case story, how you can use the knowlegde about best practice to benchmark your own business in order to improve your processes and your performance. Click here to see more about the articles.

Book: R.G. Cooper, Winning at New Products

This book gives you a detailed introduction to the studies of over 2000 product launches and an in-depth look at creating and implementing a successful development process.

Click here to see more and order the book.

You can benchmark your own company against the best and find out exactly how you can improve your performance. The rule of thumb is that you can find ways to:

Increase success rate by 10-30%

Reduce time-to-market by 30%

See more about benchmarking!

More about the contents of the two articles

Article 1: Uncovering the best practices

The reasons for high performance have been uncovered by over 20 years of research by Professor Robert G. Cooper and his colleagues at McMaster University in Canada who have studied the reasons for why new products becomes successes or failures.
The article reports about the main results of this research which fall in two main categories. The first category focuses on comparing successful projects with unsuccessful ones. As a result, a set of factors which separates success and failure projects has been identified. The second category focuses on the company or the business unit. Successful business units have been compared with less successful units. Again a set of differentiating factors for the two units has been identified.

Article 2: Case: Benchmarking product development at EuroTech Inc.

We have transformed the success-failure research into a tool and a database that companies can use for benchmarking.
In this article we report about how a cross-functional group of senior managers benchmarked their company against the industry standard as well as against the top 20% of the best performing companies. You will see how this management group identified effective ways to redesign their company’s innovation practices for much higher performance in terms of better success rates, shorter time from idea to market and much better adherence to time schedules.

Goto top of page