MediCube - The Incubator On-line Platform

The existence and the course of a business in the form of a company, enterprise or corporation is directly linked with the course of its products. A business unit exists to sell products and as far as the product sales go well so is the business unit. Products like everything else in life have a certain life cycle. Each product goes through this life cycle and eventually dies out. Products, which were once a household name, have disappeared from the market as they entered the decline phase of their life cycle. So due to this fact the long-term operation of a business depends on the on going development of new products.

The rapid development of new technologies, the shift change in customer needs and attributes, and the gradual increase of the competition has forced all business to adopt New Product Development (NPD) as a necessary and unavoidable business practice. NPD is a complex and time-consuming process, which cannot be taken lightly, since it holds more perils than first meets the eye.

According to David S. Hopkins and Earl L. Baily ^[1] research has shown that 40% of new consumer products, 20% of new industrial products and 18% of new services related products have failed completely as products. Further research has shown that the new product failure percentage is even greater in countries outside the US.

To avoid development of a new product that will not be a success in a market and to minimize the costs of such a development a NPD Roadmap can be used. Such a roadmap is a tool that can help companies and organizations to successfully develop new products or upgrade existing ones through a series of logical steps, starting from the process of idea generation and ending at the launch of the product into a market.

This process contains a series of activities called "Levels" and control points, called "Assessments". Each Level contains information and well-defined series of activities concerned with the particular Level of the development and each Assessment is a decision point where senior management can keep on or stop funding the process. In more detail, a Level contains all the information and tools that are needed to successfully complete the particular Level and an Assessment contains the required questions or specifications or mandates to which the results of the previous Level are compared to so that a go / kill or hold decision can be made. In the next chapters each Level is analysed further, and all relevant information or tools that can be used are presented. All Assessments are given in Appendices. In the final chapters of this report the complete roadmap is presented including all Levels and Assessments.

Each Level is split up in sections that include a definition of the problem that the Level is asked to tackle, a possible solution to the problem and an analysis of the tools available to tackle the problem. Each tool is properly defined, the references, on-line resources, software sources and consultancies or organizations that can help to use the tool are given and case studies of where and how the toll has been used are presented in separate sections. All Assessments are designed to work interactively with a potential roadmap user. Also tools and templates developed are given for the same reason.

The roadmap presented can be used not only as an informative tool but also as a complete guide of a NPD process. The tools, best practices and other relevant material presented, explained and analysed further down in the report are in most cases given in the form of files linked to this document so that a reader can use them to perform his own NPD process. The true purpose and final scope of this report is to provide the means for the development of a complete on-line NPD roadmap. One should note that the roadmap itself would not be able to answer all the questions or tackle all the problems of such a process unless the final user enters information whenever this is required and based on analysis results move forward into the process.