CLIMB Model: Toward a Maturity Assessment Model for Product Development

Product development (PD) becomes crucial for the competitiveness, survival and prosperity of any organization. In order to deliver products successfully, companies can choose between a vast amount of best practices to apply in their innovation processes. However PD processes are still wasteful in practice. With the aim of (i) creating awareness between practitioners on the meaning of PD best practices, (ii) understanding how to measure the maturity in the use of such best practices and in order to (iii) understand the real level of application of these practices, the paper propose CLIMB: a maturity assessment model based on prevalent PD best practices in literature able to measure the maturity of companies in their PD activities. Also the paper proposes the results of an empirical data collection in 2012-2013 within the GeCo Observatory initiative in Italy, which gathered data through face-to-face interviews from more than 100 companies using the CLIMB model. The results is that the tool is effective and that more researches are needed to understand which circumstances lead the choice of certain PD best practices over others.