New Product Development, or NPD is a process. Patents are always part of it. Product design is too. Manufacturing is a flawless part of it and distribution and sales is the deciding success factor. If someone with nothing better to do walked into a large home center, and then a gigantic department store, then one each of all the specialty stores, a drug store as well and even a food market, and then compiled a count of how many products could be identified as manufactured products, the number would be large. One hundred thousand or a million; it doesn't matter. It would be very large.A large percentage of the products, say 99.9% of them, from dental floss in a unique container for $.99 or a new automobile for $45,000, have a lot in common. They all come from product producing industries; industries that employ engineering departments, manufacturing facilities, marketing experts and sales and distribution departments to keep the products moving and to add new products to the mix as well. The companies keep growing and producing and that is good for all of us. The heart of the business world is NPD, or new product development.What about the other one tenth of one percent? Who does that tiny number represent? Those are energetic innovators trying to get a piece of the action so to speak. They might have a patent for a new product idea they believed in. They may also have a manufacturing process of sorts that which comprises of them and piece part bins. They themselves may be the sales force that sells the product at trade shows and on the Internet. Chances are all of them have spent hundreds of hours glued to a work bench laboring over methods to turn their sketches into working bread-boards and engineering prototypes. They've made their ideas real and who knows the magnitude of the rewards that will follow. Maybe one of the large established companies will license or buy the rights to the products, or maybe with more money and much more time, many of the innovators involved will become successful new company owners. I for one certainly hope so.
So! What is development? Development, as I see it, is what companies and individual innovators go through to turn an idea into a product specification ready for manufacturing and sale. The inventing precedes it by many months and maybe even years. Development isn't difficult for those trained in the associated skills. It's a process where everyone knows what the new product idea is and how it works. Development is selecting the right manufacturing process for each component, having them made and assembling them for packaging and sale. Once the idea is invented, conceptualized, prototyped, tested and documented, it is ready for design and development. Those are areas people with new ideas want to make sure their homework has been done before spending the big bucks on the stages following feasibility and successful testing.Once an idea is defined and tested to a point of accepted feasibility, all kinds of planning for cost-effective development can take place. Patents can be initiated and manufacturing processes can be selected. The design of the product rapidly follows. It's only a matter of knowing what you have, how it works and most important, who is going to buy it, in order to put a business plan in place. That's the rational used for 99.9% of the products on the market today and should be for the hard-working innovators that represent the remaining.1% of the market as well.
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