Organizing product development for rapid response. A case study on approaches towards sudden product development needs.

Occasionally, product development needs emerge suddenly through customer requests, by sales input or internally within a company. Then, there comes a sudden need to create new products more quickly than previously defined processes are designed for. Companies often seek to find different processes for projects of differing scope and complexity. There are many approaches to accelerating product development and reducing lead-time, but there is very little empirical research on how companies actually organize these faster development projects. A case study of eight companies was conducted with semi-structured interviews and focus groups to find out how they approach product development when they need to create product faster than what their new product development processes would allow. Results show that companies with a product-based offering have identified projects with different scope and complexity, but have not always defined how to approach them successfully. Companies with a project-based offering tend to approach all projects in a similar manner and do not make large changes to their processes based on project scope. The most used literature-based approaches that the case companies followed were: overlapping development stages, lead user involvement and emphasizing the customer.