Analysis of a New Product Development Strategy Based on a Heuristic Multi-criteria Methodology

Abstract

In the recent years, there has been a significant attention among researchers and practitioners to new product development (NPD) strategies. The development of a new product also has long been categorized as the key function of companies in an increasingly competitive global market. However, the initiation of a new product is a process involving risk and uncertainty. That is why companies needs to adapt more accurate product development strategies and evaluate the launching of a new product carefully. One way to cope with this risk is to use novel product development strategies. Therefore, this control problem is formulated as a systematic decision process in order to select the more rational candidate to be launched as a new product. Basically in this chapter, the determination of a comparable new product alternatives and the selection of the best one is done through an integrated approach based on a heuristic multi-criteria decision methodology. The Pythagorean Fuzzy sets (PFSs) are used as an objective world environment since its definite advantages in handling vagueness and uncertainty. A significant focus of the chapter is the dependency of decision criteria and to reflect this situation, the Pythagorean Fuzzy based heuristic approach is proposed for the first time as a combination of AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and ARAS (Additive Ratio Assessment). A production system is considered where manufacturing of a new product is performed in a Group Decision Making (GDM) setting. Literature reviewed in this chapter presents the current state of the art and discusses the potential future research trends. Finally, a practical case study is presented to demonstrate the potential of the methodology and validate the outcome.