New Product Development Model

The New Product Development model breaks the journey from strategy to market into seven fixed stages - new product strategy, idea generation, screening and evaluation, business analysis, development, testing, commercialisation - so a company kills weak ideas early instead of finding out expensively at launch.

Stages run left to right in a single row, each one a gate where weak ideas get cut.

The fixed stages from strategy to commercialisation, with a kill decision at every gate.

Reach for this when…

Ideas get discussed forever and never reach a shelf or a customer.
You've launched a flop that a five-minute business case would have stopped.
Different products get developed by different unwritten rules.

How to run it

Set the new-product strategy first: what role should new products play against your objectives?
Generate ideas from customers, staff, and the market, not just the top team.
Screen and evaluate hard: kill ideas that don't fit strategy or capability before they cost money.
Run the business analysis: cost, margin, volume, break-even.
Develop and test the product, then commercialise it with a plan for what happens if it underperforms.

A worked example

Situation. Alejandro Reyes ran Muebles Reyes, a family furniture manufacturer in Guadalajara, Mexico, whose catalogue had not changed meaningfully in six years.

Applied. He forced every new idea, including the modular shelving system his son had sketched, through the stages: screened against factory capability, tested as a cardboard concept with twenty customers, costed properly before a single board was cut.

Result. Two of the three ideas in that round died at the screening stage. The shelving system launched four months later and became the best-selling line within its first year.

Kowalski Meble's real work happened at Screening & evaluation, where two of three ideas were killed.

The catch

The stages can calcify into a bureaucracy that kills genuinely unconventional ideas for not fitting the template, and a rigid gate process moves too slowly for markets that shift week to week. It also assumes you can know enough upfront to write a business case; some ideas only prove themselves once real customers touch them.

A gate that nobody has ever failed isn't quality control, it's a formality. If everything passes, tighten it.

Origin: Booz, Allen & Hamilton

connecteddale