Product development strategy: An integration of technology and marketing

Although it seems obvious that a new product development strategy must bring together marketing and R&D strategies, the conceptual development of marketing and R&D strategies has taken place in relative isolation. More than ten years ago, when Professor Harry Nystrom began his research program on product development in Swedish firms, he realized that the isolation wasn't an appropriate point of view. He began to construct a conceptual framework for analyzing product development strategies that incorporated many more variables than had traditionally been considered. The latest set of firms in the research program are four pulp and paper companies. They are in mature, process industries, quite unlike the earlier study firms. Yet many of the same propositions from the earlier research still hold. In this article, Professor Nystrom presents the most recent version of his framework to help managers develop an integrated product development strategy.