Product development processes and their importance to organizational capabilities

Abstract

Product development is a creative and interdisciplinary activity that transforms a market opportunity and technological innovation into successful products. It is a set of activity-based processes in a product-oriented enterprise, and is essential to the economic success of such organization. Determining important processes in the product development and determining their relationships with organizational capability are crucial to the sustainable success in product development. Studying their relationships would give us insights into the product development dynamics. The objectives of this research are to provide a framework to determine the importance of product development processes and their relationship with organizational capabilities, to provide an assessment vehicle that helps organizations assess their capabilities and make improvements, and to improve predictions of project outcomes as the ultimate goal. To fulfill the objectives and to achieve the goal of this research, a step-based approach was adopted: first, Identify important processes in product development, second, identify an organization's capability using important product development processes identified through literature review and survey. Third, study various factors that influence the determination of importance of product development and the capability of product development were studied. Forth, test two hypotheses based on the statistics. The work in this thesis illustrates how various factors such as company size, industry sectors, and professional experience may influence the dynamics of product development process.