Strategic Management of Product Development Process Capability using Neural Network Approach

摘要

New product development (NPD) is considered to be one of the best strategies to handle the rapid changes that occur in the market Tor a product, in order to sustain competitive position. Though some researchers attempt to study factors that affect the capability of NPD by a firm; none of them tried to quantify them. Quantification of the factors is essential in order to achieve adequate control over the product development activities. In this paper, a neural network based methodology is developed in MATLAB code to quantify the NPD capability. This may help a firm to develop a selected set of capabilities into core competences in long run. The networks are used at two stages and the output of the neural network model at stage-2 is the quantified value of NPD capability. A feed forward network with one hidden layer is used for both stages. For case study, data is taken from the literature. The data is available over a selected time span and neural network is trained, tested and validated for the available data.