Paulo S. Figueiredo

Enhancing New Product Development (NPD) Portfolio Performance by Shaping the Development Funnel

New product development (NPD) projects are typically managed through a series of screens, or gates, where ideas compete for resources. Ideas are carved into projects, and these projects are reviewed, and approved or terminated through the screening process so that only the best performing projects continue to subsequent stages of design, development and testing, and are released into the market place (Krishnan and Ulrich 2001; Terwiesch and Ulrich 2009). Most large innovative organizations deal with more than one NPD project at a time and typically engage in product pipeline management (PPM), where a set of active projects are evaluated together while they traverse through a sequence of such screens. Key decisions in a R&D pipeline are: screen thresholds, complexity of projects, resource allocation and capacity adjustment biases. We explore the impact of structural and behavioral aspects of these decisions through a simulation based analysis of a pharmaceutical dataset. Results establish concave relationships between value created at the end of pipeline and the resource allocation and complexity allocation biases, indicating optimizability and a limit for front loading practices.

Antecedents of innovation in industry

Purpose Today, organizations must be able to create innovative strategies, and creative performance depends on knowing what hinders or stimulates creativity. This paper aims to determine which factors in the workplace environment positively or negatively affect creativity by analyzing individuals’ perceptions in a sample of Brazilian industrial companies. Design/methodology/approach The discussion is based on the componential theory of creativity and the use of a recognized research instrument (KEYS). A regression analysis was carried out, using eight environmental factors related to creativity. The purpose of the collection is to observe the statistical relationships between the scales of the factors and the results related to creativity. Findings Among the eight factors of the original componential theory, only three were found to have a significant impact on the creative process: organizational incentives, challenging work and support from the work group. Research limitations/implications The sample in this study was relatively small, and a larger sample will be required to undertake factor analysis. Practical implications Possible implications for the management of innovation in the Brazilian context are discussed in light of these results. Originality/value This study contributed to the production of knowledge, still scarce in the country, about the search for creative solutions through the work environment by confirming which factors are significant and determinants of creative performance and challenging factors that had already been proven by other studies in non-Brazilian contexts.