Engineering and Design Best Practices in New Product Development: an Empirical Research

Nowadays companies are subject to pressuring and challenging calls for innovation. New Product Development (NPD) becomes a crucial function for competitiveness, survival and prosperity. In order to deliver products successfully, companies can choose between a vast amount of best practices to apply in their innovation processes. This paper proposes a classification framework of prevalent NPD best practices obtained through literature investigation and focus groups with experts. Moreover, this study presents a research conducted in 2012 and 2013 across 103 companies based in Italy, with the aim to understand the level of implementation of the proposed framework of NPD best practices. Finally, starting from the analysis of the collected data, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the contingency of best practices: since one size doesn’t fit all, is it correct to talk about best practices in general or should we start considering them context dependent? Data demonstrates that moving research towards this direction makes definitely sense.