5 GOLDEN RULES for successful NPD
Get advice
From NPD consultants, finance or intellectual property specialists, or your NZTE regional customer manager. Different companies will require different expertise – you may need to work on strategy first, or look at lean manufacturing to ensure your production lines are efficient enough to handle new products coming through.
NPD is all about people – get that right and everything else will follow.
This means assembling a good cross-functional team with clear roles and responsibilities who can work together to meet challenges and achieve well-set objectives. Ensure you have leadership that checks in but doesn’t take ownership of the process; that’s why you assembled a good team. This will help you avoid costly and time-consuming loopbacks. “There is a reasonably formal process to innovation and to NPD that’s been around for a long time,” says Armstrong. “While you can challenge it and improve it, you should respect the process to a certain degree.”
Balance your projects.
Have a mix of smaller, incremental projects and long-term projects and allocate time to both. Smaller businesses won’t be able to assign different teams to different projects; instead split your week and dedicate one day to a long-term project. No one is creative when they have 110 projects on the go so look at the flow of projects through your organisation to ensure it doesn’t all end up on the same desk with the same deadline.
Make your business strategy and NPD goals visual.
Set out a physical plan that helps communicate to everyone in your team/company: where the business is now; where you want to be in five years’ time; how you’ll get there; what new products you’ll need to launch and how they need to perform. A new products roadmap will allow you to step back and take a bigger view. “There’s a huge amount of power in having your weekly work in progress visual,” says Van der Geest. “Map it out so everyone can see it. Don't keep it hidden on your computer. It also stops the sales guys knocking on the R&D guys’ door asking ‘Where’s my project at?’”