An Interim Report on Measuring Product Development Success and Failure

Abstract

This article represents findings of a PDMA task force studying measures of product development success and failure. This investigation sought to identify all currently used measures, organize them into categories of similar measures that perform roughly the same function, and contrast the measures used by academics and companies to evaluate new product development performance. The authors compared the measures used in over seventy-five published studies of new product development to those surveyed companies say they use. The concept of product development success has many dimensions and each may be measured in a variety of ways. Firms generally use about four measures from two different categories in determining product development success. Academics and managers tend to focus on rather different sets of product development success/failure measures. Academics tend to investigate product development performance at the firm level, whereas managers currently measure, and indicate that they want to understand more completely, individual product success.