Two Essays on Developing and Launching New Products

New product development (NPD) is the lifeblood of innovative firms. It is difficult to open a popular business magazine and not read about an up-and-coming product or read a story of a new product failure. Both academics and practitioners are continually looking for better ways to create new products and to measure new product success. The present research addresses two gaps in the new product and marketing strategy literature by investigating how firms can improve the new product developmental process and by exploring how firms can improve their method of measuring the impact of new product launch. Essay one (chapter two) introduces the topic of design crowdsourcing, which is defined as the practice of soliciting design concepts from the crowd (e.g. customer community) for new products during the design phase of NPD. Essay one highlights the role that those outside the organization can play in helping firms execute new product ideas and studies the characteristics that influence the decision to design crowdsource and the financial outcome of that decision. Essay two (chapter three) demonstrates how firms can better assess the success or failure of new products by measuring the indirect impact that new products have on other products already in the marketplace. New products could either hurt (negative cannibalization effect) or help (positive halo effect) the sales of those already existing products. Essay two addresses when new products are likely to help or hurt existing products and investigates the moderators that determine which effect is manifested.