Size and Timing Do Matter: NPD Model Growth Between the Initial Screen and One-Year Post Launch

R&D forecasting models promise up to 88 percent accuracy. Nonetheless, managers have not adopted long-term NPD models such as NewProd, and failure rates keep rising. This paper examines model underutilization by measuring changes in practitioner retrospection of success variables between the initial screening and one year post launch. The resulting linear regression models become more complex over time, as accurate as NewProd, and exhibit less measurement error. This is important because frequent NPD environmental changes, so obvious and intuitive to managers, would quite naturally discourage use of NewProd and other static, single-stage long-term models.