Determining the Best Launch Time for New Products with Risk Considerations in a Competitive Market Situation

Despite the high failure rate of New Product Development (NPD) projects, NPD is one of the critical success factors in most leading companies. One primary reason is that proactive product development can influence the competitive success and renewal of organizations (References Available on Request). Decision on time of introducing a new product is quite challenging as it requires a careful trade-off analysis. For instance, there are conflicting objectives from marketing and operational perspectives with respect to launching time of a new product (References Available on Request). Specifically, a too late entry could likely lead to significant loss of opportunity while a too early entry could possibly not be receptive enough from customers, channel members, and other required partners (References Available on Request). Incorporating risk considerations can augment the complexity of determining the best launch time and consequently it has not been addressed well in literature despite risky nature of NPD projects.