What is Product Development?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product to market. A product is a set of benefits offered for exchange and can be tangible (that is, something physical you can touch) or intangible (like a service, experience, or belief). There are 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 see 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.
Product Development is the creation of products with new or different characteristics that offer new or additional benefits to the customer. Product development may involve modification of an existing product or its presentation, or formulation of an entirely new product that satisfies a newly defined customer want or market niche.
Product development is a broad field of endeavor dealing with the design, creation, and marketing of new products. Sometimes referred to as 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 a number 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 the 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 includes 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.”
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