PRODUCT OFFERING AS PART OF THE NPD PROCESS IN TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES

Abstract

We present an exploratory investigation of how managers conceptualize and perceive the product offering effort variables in successful and unsuccessful New Product Development (NPD) projects, and explore the role that product offering effort variables play in differentiating between successful and unsuccessful NPD outcomes. Our findings indicate that managers rely on two broad types of product offering factors, "product effort" and "price/cost effort", during the NPD process so that there are differences in metric equivalence across successful and unsuccessful NPD projects. Also, although all product effort variables, but none of the price/cost efficiency variables, are positively related to NPD success, managers in Finnish technology companies attach somewhat lower relative importance to product offering variables in comparison to studies of NPD intelligence in other countries. Limitation and practical implications are discussed.