New Product Management - Assignment Example

The paper "New Product Management" is a worthy example of an assignment on marketing.

1What is a stage-gate process? What are the reason and likely results in adopting this approach?
--- The Stage-Gate Process was developed by Dr. Robert G. Cooper and consists of the conceptual and operational roadmap for creating and implementing a new product for companies. Thus the Stage-Gate system breaks the innovation process down into a predetermined set of stages, with each stage having a set of prescribed, cross-functional, and parallel activities A gate is used to enter each stage. These gates are responsible for the quality as well as process control. The five key and overlapping stages are :

a. Preliminary Investigation: This is a starting step with primary market information being collected and preliminary plans for assessment are made. A very small team is used here.

b. Detailed Investigation: The detailed plans are made in this stage. It includes proper and professional market research, detailed technical feasibility studies and a detailed financial and business analysis. This stage comprises of a core team of marketing, technical, and manufacturing people. The outcome of this stage is defined product requirement, economic justification and a detailed project plan which includes the resource requirements and TAT (Turnaround time) requirements.

c. Development: Here the actual development of the new product starts. A prototype is developed and the product undergoes in-house testing along with limited customer testing The marketing plan is started and rigors test and QA plans are developed. The full team gets functional here which includes people from production, QA, Process, and engineering, HR and finance.

d. Testing and Validation: In this step, the new product is thoroughly tested and validated. The deliverable is a fully tested product and production process, ready for

commercialization.

e. Full Production and Market Launch: Complete commercialization and launch of the product. It denotes the start of the full-fledged production of the new product. Sales and Marketing people take over and drive any new changes for market positioning.

Since this model consists of different stages and gates, this helps in checking each stage deliverables by the team to assess the risk and success of the project. Many gates help in stopping potential failures before a lot of time has been wasted in their execution. It also detects and helps to correct problems early in the project

When implemented properly, Stage-Gate is a very helpful tool to accelerate speed-to-market, it also increases the likelihood of product success since the quality checks have already filtered out most of the issues. By following this model, the management knows about each and every step in advance and need not waste time coming up with a model. Moreover, it helps in achieving an efficient and effective allocation of scarce resources