The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

35.5. Summary

In summary, applying lessons learned from leading practitioner companies is often a very effective method for companies facing challenges in launching or improving their new product development performance. The PDMA's Outstanding Corporate Innovator award companies provide a valuable set of such learning experiences for other companies.

Our analysis has found that all of the winners had in place processes, systems, and resources that reflected the following notable best practices:

• A well-defined product development process unique to their market and technology environment

• A strong commitment to cross-functional teams as the fundamental organizational construct for executing new product development

• Strong voice of the customer input

• A robust process at the front end to drive innovation in their product portfolio

• A strong linkage of new product development to the company's corporate strategy, therefore, ensuring top management commitment

While a clear set of common practices were defined across the population of past award winners, it also appears the implementation detail of these common practices varied across the group, driven by their market, technology, and organizational environments. In many cases, the chosen solutions are quite distinctive and provided the greatest learning for the new product development community. The unique solutions, we believe, in fact show that a key best practice is to mold a company's new product development process to the unique market, ...