Product Description

New Products Management, 8/e, by Crawford and Di Bennedetto provides future new product managers, project managers and team leaders with a comprehensive overview of the new product development process including how to develop an effective development strategy, manage cross-functional teams across the organization, generate and evaluate concepts, manage the technical development of a product, develop the marketing plan, and manage the financial aspects of a project.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179779 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

Customer Reviews

A Good Overview of The New Products Process
The book is organized into five parts:

Part I - Overview and Opportunity Identification/Selection; includes an introductory section and The New Products Process, and Opportunity Identification and Selection.

Part II - Concept Generation; includes sections on Preparation and Alternatives, Problem-Based Ideation, Analytical Attribute Approaches.

Part III - Concept/Project Evaluation; includes sections on The Concept Evaluation System, Concept Testing, Full Screen, Sales Forecasting and Financial Analysis and Product Protocol.

Part IV - Development; includes sections on Design, Development Team Management, Special Issues in Development and Product Use Testing.

Part V - Launch; includes sections on Strategic Launch Planning, Implementation of the Strategic Plan, Market Testing, Launch Management and Public Policy Issues.

The book is a thorough overview of the product planning process, and a very useful validation for someone who had already been involved in product planning. The book could have been enriched considerably by the use of more case studies and examples. The Applications section at the end of each chapter was meant to be a method of reflecting upon and putting into practice some of the ideas learned in the chapter; but the questions were oddly written and there was no "answer key" or discussion of those questions, so I didn't find that section useful at all.

A Reference Text to Keep By Your Side
Having taken the U of Mich course centered around the material in this text, I can tell you that you'll find at least a third of the material directly applicable to NPD processes at work. A great primer for anyone new to NPD.

New Products Management
Let's face it, texts are not becoming any cheaper. While not escalating like tuitions, they are more than they used to be 20 years ago, inflation included. For that increased amount, the text better be damn good and chuck full of material to get the new student on the right path, and the professor on course with the latest material.

So does this book fit the bill? Yes and no. A lot of this is rehashed material from what I can see pertaining to methodology, but there is a strikingly large amount of mention to recent products. This may be because the book was originally written in 1983, with seven updates including the '06 version.

I am not an educator so will leave this one to the professionals to decide if the newer text warrants the wrath of the students for a new edition or not.

For educators and students and product managers who used to be engineers (there are more than you think out there).

Note: why do textbooks look like text books? The design is very 80's.