Abstract:
New product development (NPD) is the process of converting new ideas linked to a
product, into products that could be sold in the market successfully. The phases of NPD
include several important steps such as market studies, product development,
commercialization, and the introduction of market analysis. NPD is critical to the
development and success of many firms. Hence, in environments of quick technological
revolution, rapidly changing customer demands like in fashion industries, industrialists
must be cognizant of the strategy of developing new products and/or process innovations
in evolving changes in environment and technologies. Formal NPD strategy includes
specific product concept statements, target markets, and structured project portfolio
management, which means, the NPD strategy defines what the organization aims to
achieve from its new products and offers strategic guidance for its NPD activities
Most importantly, the structure of an industry and national innovation systems can set the
conditions for innovation challenges by impacting the sources of information or input into
the creative process, the impact of standards and regulation, and the need for collaboration
and the types of business models that yield success. Therefore, this study is a systematic
journey of developing an NPD strategy for African Mosaique Enterprise Plc.
In this case internal (resource and capability of the firm) & external; political, economic,
socio-cultural, technological, legal & environmental (PESTLE) factors that may influence
the stated product development is investigated and evaluated as to be strength, weakness,
opportunities, and threat (SWOT). Based on these findings, NPD strategies were developed
and their importance value is evaluated by experts’ evaluation by fuzzy-Technique for
Order of Preference by similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) multi-criteria decision
making (MCDM) model. The result shows that incorporating social value in the NPD
process, product differentiating, and cost-minimizing product strategies are founded to top
three NPD strategies for the case company.