Expert Systems and New Product Screening

Abstract

Since firms in virtually all industries are facing increased competition, the development of new products is accelerating to maintain or improve a firms’ market position. Unfortunately, there are high developmental costs and low success rates associated with new products. A formalized screening process which considers all relevant factors for product success should decrease the number of poor product ideas which pass screening. The situation lends itself to the development of an expert system- a set of computer programs and coded knowledge that interact so that the system can reason and solve problems by emulating the logical processes of the human mind.