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Development Resource Planning: Complexity of Product Development and the Capacity to Launch New Products
Author(s) -
Yu Abraham Sin Oih,
Figueiredo Paulo S.,
De Souza Nascimento Paulo Tromboni
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of product innovation management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.646
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1540-5885
pISSN - 0737-6782
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2010.00713.x
Subject(s) - new product development , business , resource (disambiguation) , product (mathematics) , operations management , computer science , revenue , industrial organization , limited resources , process management , operations research , marketing , economics , risk analysis (engineering) , mathematics , finance , computer network , geometry
Overcommitment of development capacity or development resource deficiencies are important problems in new product development (NPD). Existing approaches to development resource planning have largely neglected the issue of resource magnitude required for NPD. This research aims to fill the void by developing a simple higher‐level aggregate model based on an intuitive idea: The number of new product families that a firm can effectively undertake is bound by the complexity of its products or systems and the total amount of resources allocated to NPD. This study examines three manufacturing companies to verify the proposed model. The empirical results confirm the study's initial hypothesis: The more complex the product family, the smaller the number of product families that are launched per unit of revenue. Several suggestions and implications for managing NPD resources are discussed, such as how this study's model can establish an upper limit for the capacity to develop and launch new product families.