New Product Development Framework for Multinational Multi-locations Based Organizations in South East Asia

The ability of organizations to introduce new products faster, more frequently, and of higher quality is a distinct competitive advantage. To further improves competitiveness, some multinational organizations had relocated their Research and Development (R&D), design and manufacturing activities to South East Asia region in order to gain geographical and economical advantages. Hence, New Product Development (NPD) in the new multinational organizations in South East Asia often involves the coordination of activities across multi-locations teams. Thus, based on Theory of Integrated-Product Development, this paper proposed a new conceptual NPD integrated framework for multinational and multi-locations based organizations in South East Asia. The new integrated NPD framework consists of five NPD phases, namely Opportunity Identification, Concept Development, Design & Development, Product Testing and Product Commercialization. The proposed framework promotes multiple feedback loops, parallel execution and concurrent workflow of NPD activities. The new framework has descriptive value in terms of studying, classifying and defining the relationships that govern process and management aspects of NPD within multinational and multi-locations based organizations in South East Asia. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.