A study on the application of business plans in new product development processes

The present work presents a study on the application of business plans (BP) (a widely used document for investment decisions of new enterprises), with standard new product development processes (PDPs). The main objective was to find out whether it may be applied and, if so, at which moments it should be used in the PDP. The main source of information in this exploratory research was the existing literature concerning product and business development processes, business plans models and similar documentation, and project selection and evaluation methods. Then, these contents have been compared using the PDP stages as references. As a result, the study points out that a business plan is a document that models business, and it can gather enough information for investment decision analyses. It can also be elaborated concurrently with the PDP stages and used at the PDP decision gates. However, business dynamics has favored other forms of documentation for early decisions, such as synopses, presentations and even web-pages (for external resources). Business plan contents are still relevant and useful for new enterprises investment decisions.