Product Development

Product development, the broad field of endeavor dealing with the design, creation, and marketing of new products. Sometimes referred as the new product development (NPD), the discipline is focused on developing systematic methods for guiding all the processes involved in getting a new product to market.

There are many numbers of organizations dedicated to supporting product development professionals, such as the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the Product Development Institute (PDI). According to PDMA, the organization's mission is "to improve the effectiveness of people engaged in developing and managing new products - both new manufactured goods and new services. This mission consists of facilitating the generation of new information, helping convert this information into knowledge which is in a usable format, and making this new knowledge broadly available to those who might benefit from it.”

Product development (PD) is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product or service to market. There are mainly two parallel paths involved in the NPD process: one involves the idea generation, product design and detail engineering; the other involves market research and marketing analysis. Companies typically consider new product development as the first stage in generating and commercializing new products within the overall strategic process of product life cycle management used to maintain or grow their market share.

The processes for the product development are as follows:

• Idea Generation
• Idea Screening
• Concept Development and Testing
• Business Analysis
• Beta Testing and Market Testing
• Technical Implementation
• Commercialization
• New Product Pricing