Report from the March 2004 New Orleans PDMA/IIR Conference on identifying drivers of NPD success

by Anthony Di Benedetto, Department of Marketing, Temple University.

As I write this, I have just returned from New Orleans where I attended the PDMA Foundation’s presentation of the initial results from the PDMA Foundation’s new Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). Highlights of the study may be found by clicking here. The conference ran from March 18 to 19 and was entitled “Identifying the Drivers of New Product Development Success.” It was co-sponsored by the PDMA and the Institute for International Research (IIR). Initial results from the study were announced, and over two days leaders from industry and academia gave presentations on best practices at top-performing firms in product development, such as Unilever, Herman Miller, Procter & Gamble, Entrosol, International Truck, Baxter Healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, Hunter Douglas, and many others.

As I was listening to the presentations, I was struck by how many of the issues raised by the senior managers of these leading product developing firms paralleled the topics found in the most recent issues of our Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM or the Journal). The conference was organized around topic areas: Overview of Best Practices, Process and Collaboration, Tools and Methodologies, Strategy, Organization, and Marketing Science. Senior managers at major companies gave individual presentations on these topics. For instance, Ken Munsch of Herman Miller spoke about his firm’s successful platform partnering into new markets. Terry Kreplin of Baxter Healthcare addressed the use of rapid prototyping and visualization. John Horne of International Trucks presented on the development of a NPD strategy for his firm’s new lines of trucks, while Mehmood Khan gave details of Unilever’s worldwide holistic approach to innovation. Other speakers discussed cross-functional teaming, aligning resources to the product portfolio, and using Voice of the Customer information to drive product design and positioning. It’s impossible to do justice to these great presentations in a sentence or two; but my point here is that we readers of JPIM will recognize these are familiar topics currently under study by our leading NPD researchers. In fact, we have had, or will soon have, Special Issues devoted to several of these topics.

It’s a very good sign that our Journal is presenting leading-edge research that is consistent with the issues and concerns of NPD practitioners in industry. It’s even better to see that top managers from the best NPD firms are willing to present their successes in a learning environment, and that virtually every presentation was followed by a thought-provoking Q&A session to ensure a learning experience for everyone present. I believe a conference such as this one has important implications for NPD academics as well. It seems we have done a good job, so far, in identifying and researching the issues that management thinks are important. By listening to the best practices and carefully considering the unanswered questions that inevitably arise, NPD academics can develop a platform for their future research that will help them keep on track and continue to address the emerging challenges facing NPD managers today.

Anthony Di Benedetto is Professor of Marketing at Temple University.

JPIM Manuscripts Special Instructions for Authors All new manuscripts should be sent to JPIM Editor Anthony Di Benedetto Revisions of manuscripts submitted 12/31/03 or before should be resent to former JPIM Editor Abbie Griffin Format: Please submit your manuscripts by email in an electronic Wordcompatible file in a Wintel platform.

Preview of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, July 2004

1. Blau, Joseph Pekny, Vishal Varma, and Paul Bunch
This article, by three chemical engineering professors and a pharmaceutical industry executive, describes a new methodology for selecting and sequencing potential new products under resource constraints. This is a probabilistic discrete event simulation model of the development of new pharmaceuticals. The model estimates potential risks and returns for potential drugs, and is adapted to allow for resource, success, and other interdependencies between drugs. The authors use a genetic algorithm to create permutations of the product sequence in order to optimize the portfolio of products. The usefulness of the methodology is demonstrated by selecting and sequencing nine new drug products.

2. Erwin Danneels
The second article examines five themes related to disruptive technology. Starting from the seminal work by Clayton Christensen, Danneels integrates theory from several different research streams to present a critique of what has been written about disruptive technology. He then develops a set of suggestions for future research in this area along the following themes: defining disruptive technology, the predictive use of the theory of technological disruption, explaining the success of incumbents, implications of the theory for the merits of being customeroriented, and the merits of creating a spinoff to commercialize the technology.

3. Darren Dahl and Steve Hoeffler
In the third article, Dahl and Hoeffler study how new-product evaluations change depending on whether individuals are asked to imagine themselves or someone else using the product. Evaluation levels differ depending on whether the product is incrementally or radically new. The authors find that evaluations are higher for incremental new products in the case of self-visualization, while product evaluations are higher for radical new products if someone else is visualized as using the product.

4. Steve Michael and Tracy Palandjian
In the last article, the authors use data from the shampoo market to study the relationship between organizational learning and new product success. The shampoo market is interesting to study because of its dynamic nature, due to customer variety- seeking and preference changes. The authors find that organizational learning, after the second product is introduced to the market, is associated with lower success, as measured by shorter durations of a product being on the market.

Our issue concludes with abstracts and book reviews supplied by our section editors, Ken Kahn and Preston Smith. We thank them for their contributions.

These are articles accepted by and edited by Abbie Griffin, Professor, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, while still Editor of JPIM (through Dec. 31, 2003).

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