42. Ideas to Concepts Through the Concept Exploration Process

New product introduction is an important contributor to a firm's growth and profitability. Successful introduction of a new product depends on many factors including marketing and technical activities, team, product quality, cost and launch time. Product success factors can be influenced by stakeholders from myriad avenues such as manufacturing, service and marketing. Limited understanding of stakeholders’ requirements can lead to fuzziness in NPI, especially in concept development phase (CDP). Bringing more clarity (by gathering right and required information) in concept generation reduces fuzziness. Current empirical study has been formulated to gain insights into ‘concept exploration process (CEP)’, which takes cognizance of stakeholders’ requirements while transforming ideas into concepts. The ‘divergent-convergent’ process of concept generation produces close-to-reality concepts and reduces development difficulties substantially. This study explores the impact of CEP on new product development Project Performance in terms of concept outcome, process outcome, product outcome and knowledge creation. The findings point out that incorporating stakeholder’s requirements before concept generation is positively related to NPD Project Performance and partially mediated by management support and team involvement. Idea generation and market requirements (customer and competitor) have been found to exercise higher influence on NPD Project Performance than other factors such as product definition, supplier requirement and market size assessment. The findings of the study are expected to equip product development teams and management with a better understanding of the pre-development activities while drawing greater attention to the concept exploration process and its effective implementation as an inalienable part of NPD.