New Product Development Time to Market Reduction Validating

Abstract

Currently, the markets for electronic products are changing at a rapid pace. As such, companies have been forced to employ strategic means to handle the ever-changing market dynamics. In order to solve this issue, in the last decades, new product development has grown in popularity in the academic world. The time between the inception of product idea and its transition is the new product development cycle time. New product development (NPD) speed is critical because product life cycles are shrinking and obsolescence is occurring more quickly than in the past (Sherman et al., 2000). A review of the specialized new product development literature (Langerak and Hultink, 2005; 2006; 2008) and a consultation with an Innovation Manager expert revealed the existence of eleven acceleration approaches that can enhance new product development speed and profitability, and subsequently improve the firm‟s financial performance. Under these circumstances, Royal Philips Electronics, like any other large electronics company, is facing a changing environment and the need to accelerate the NPD process in order to be able to outperform their competition and stay number one in the market. Based on the above, Philips assigned a specialized committee to address their slowdown in LED Lamps development processes, identifying non-desirable bottlenecks. Consequently, a functional team with business leaders in the lead was assigned to find a way to remove the bottlenecks. Thus, a comparison between current Philips methods and literature methods will be carried out. As such, the harmful bottlenecks will serve as a basis for the development of practical guidelines by implementing acceleration techniques within Philips‟ scope to speed up LED Lamps NPD process.