Productivity framework for innovative product development

Innovative product development (IPD) gives companies the competitive advantage required to be successful in the highly competitive market of today. The natural question is: how do you make your organization as effective as possible in the IPD process? This paper presents a framework to reason about the subject of productivity in the IPD process. The framework is deducted from the definitions of innovation and product development, an effective IPD process contains three parts; Planning (what to develop), Implementation (product realization) and Marketing, Sales and Delivery. Success comes from acknowledging the fact that there are different objectives within the three parts. The productivity of the IPD process can be expressed as a function of the efficiencies of Planning, Implementation and Marketing, Sales and Delivery. This paper is the first qualitative result of research together with seven high-tech industrial companies, with the goal to find what is required to be efficient in the Planning and the Implementation process. The key factors for success as well as some general conclusions are presented in this paper.