AN INTERIM-REPORT ON MEASURING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT SUCCESS AND FAILURE

This article represents findings of a PDMA task force studying measure s of product development success and failure. This investigation sough t to identify all currently used measures, organize them into categori es of similar measures that perform roughly the same function, and con trast the measures used by academics and companies to evaluate new pro duct development performance. The authors compared the measures used i n over seventy-five published studies of new product development to th ose surveyed companies say they use. The concept of product developmen t success has many dimensions and each may be measured in a variety of ways. Firms generally use about four measures from two different cate gories in determining product development success. Academics and manag ers tend to focus on rather different sets of product development succ ess/failure measures. Academics tend to investigate product developmen t performance at the firm level, whereas managers currently measure, a nd indicate that they want to understand more completely, individual p roduct success.