Navigating the New Product Process from StrategicViewpoint

摘要

Resource scarcity is a major difficulty facing firms that engage in new product development (NPD) projects. In order to understand how resource allocation strategies affect NPD performance and which strategy is the best alternative, we construct a research and development (R&D) process model using system dynamics. Moreover, resource allocation strategies are categorized into two types: design-stage-first strategy and manufacturing-stage-first strategy, and several important indicators of performance evaluation are defined. We then use simulation to test the relationships between resource allocation strategy and various NPD performance measures. The most important finding from simulation results is that a firm should allocate its resources into early development stage first in order to obtain superior R&D performance.