THE FRONT-END OF NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT - A CANADIAN SURVEY

Despite the importance of the early stages of a product's life, very l ittle attention has been paid to empirically testing the activities pe rformed in the front end of new product development, This article pres ents the results of a survey of 53 individuals from fifteen high techn ology firms in the integrated circuit board industry, Our study adopts Cooper's (1988) 'predevelopment' model consisting of idea generation, product definition and project evaluation stages, and probes the acti vities undertaken. in each stage, Particular activities were found to play pivotal roles in achieving the objectives of each stage, The resu lts present a clarified view of front end activities that can be used as a starting point for adequately preparing products for development and market success.