New Product Development


Date: June 2008
Author: Richard Phillipson
Price: £500 to non-members of the Investit Intelligence Member service



That Intelligence members asked for this research shows an awareness of a skill to be honed. New Product Development is part of the wider activity of product management, a function not formally described or allotted in many fund management firms. The research therefore looks at the roles involved in NPD including:

  • Product management is the job of ensuring that the products in the firm’s portfolio are as profitable as they can be and are developed over their lifetime to perform and satisfy the client need they were designed to meet.
  • Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.


NPD has three distinct roles:

  • Gathering ideas and developing them into products.
  • Managing the governance of what the firm spends time and money on.
  • Running the permanent rolling programme of ideas, business cases and implementations.

We describe the NPD process in terms of stages and gates. Each stage of work gathers information to inform a decision: whether to pursue the germ of an idea, whether to build a business case based on estimates of cost of change to the firm and potential revenues, whether to choose four incremental changes over a significant development in capability and whether the product and its service support is robust enough to launch.



Table of contents
  Management Summary 1
1.0 Introduction 3
  1.1 Structure of this paper 4
  1.2 Methodology 5
2.0 Product Portfolio Management 7
  2.1 Have we got marketing? 8
  2.2 What business are we in? 10
  2.3 Product management 12
  2.4 Are new products important? 14
  2.5 Operational impact 15
  2.6 Product maintenance 16
  2.7 Product closure 17
3.0 NPD Management 19
  3.1 Formalising NPD 20
  3.2 NPD in the organisation 22
  3.3 Supplier management 26
  3.4 Measuring NPD success 29
4.0 Idea Generation 31
  4.1 Evolution or revolution 32
  4.2 Research 34
  4.3 Treating Customers Fairly and NPD 38
5.0 Product Selection 41
  5.1 Business case outline 42
  5.2 Product selection 46
6.0 Implementation 47
  6.1 Project background and purpose 48
  6.2 Project description and objective 48
  6.3 Project organisation 48
  6.4 Risks and assumptions 49
  6.5 Constraints and dependencies 49
  6.5 Communication 49
  6.6 Workarounds 49
  6.7 The post implementation review 50
7.0 Towards Best Practice 51
  7.1 Product portfolio management 52
  7.2 NPD management 53
  7.3 Idea generation 54
  7.4 Product selection 55
  7.5 Implementation 56


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