Pre-development of new products: case studies on practices, tools, and framework

Abstract

With the uncertainties of the market and technological innovation, the complexity becomes greater in the initial phases of product development. Through case studies, this work makes a comparative analysis between the theory and practice of the pre-development of new products in a sample of large Brazilian companies, in addition to providing a framework that helps in this process. Each company adopts its own model for planning and conducting pre-development activities, which differs from theoretical models. Some activities are common among the models in the literature and the companies surveyed. Some tools adopted to operationalise activities are common in all companies studied, such as benchmarking, brainstorming and market research. The proposed framework considers aspects such as type of market, company size, degree of product innovation and structuring of the product development process to define activities and support techniques for pre-development in each case.