New product development in business to business marketing - a relational perspective

Market position and long-term competitive advantages are dependent on companies’ ability to innovate and their capacity to launch new product or services. This paper aims to highlight the features of product development processes in business to business markets. The research method consisted of a documentary study in the literature and the results focus on the stages involved in the development and launch of a new product. In recent years, statistics have shown an increase in the rate of failure in launching new products on business markets. This has been caused by an inadequate planning and has negative consequences on both customer relationships and organizational economic performance. Given this reality, academics propose a sequential product development plan based on the following essential steps: identifying opportunities and generating ideas, selection of ideas with the highest chances of success, development of new product concept materialized in the form of a prototype, technical testing and acceptance testing, making the final changes to the product, establishing brand name, price level and other intangible elements of the product, legal protection of the product, placing the product into production and effectively lunching the product though a tactical marketing program. Practical experiences show that omission of one or more stages of this process can cause product failure, companies recording a low level of performance, below expected levels.