Reducing product failure rate in products and product development projects for multinational companies in high-tech industry.

Abstract

Companies whose core business revolves around development and the launch of new products are facing the challenge that the majority of new products fail on the market-place. Product failures in high-tech industry is actually greater compared to other new product development industries. Therefore, companies are interested in determining reasons for product failures as well as in seeking improvements to reduce failures.

This thesis is aimed to address and research the area of failing new products.

The Key research questions of the thesis were:

− Why do new products fail? − What are key reasons for new products to fail? − How can new product failure rate be decreased?

This thesis outlines the key reasons for product failures and proposes the solution on how to reduce the current high product failure rate by introducing a set of business practices to be included into project and organizational management when it comes to new product development.

The proposed practices were tested in a real business environment and they proved to be working and applicable for the current environment.