Improving Management Functions in Developing New Products in Medium-Sized and Large Enterprises (A Comparative Study of Bulgarian and American Processing Industry)

Product and process innovations are viewed as a key factor for the competitiveness of organizations and regions and for achieving economic growth. The efforts of researchers in this area are focused on identifying good practices, related to the management of new products development (NPD), and bringing out those with high success rate. A number of studies on the NPD process prove that the increased research and development activeness (R&D) increases the comparative advantages and is the basis for market approval of industrial enterprises-innovators. This determines the interest of authors in studying the area of efficient management of the NPD process in industry. They research practices applied in Bulgarian industrial enterprises with the aim to prove the significance of the technology and organization for NPD and use it to synthesize and summarize a set of specific quality parameters for improving the management functions, applicable in medium-sized and large enterprises for the processing industry in approving their performance, compared to the competitors in the sector concerned.