The Research Of Product Concept Development Process Management: Based On The Needs Analtsis

The concept development stage is named as the opening stage or the Fuzzy Front-End. The importance of this stage is that it defines all the product characteristics and about 70%-80% of the development budget is decided in this stage. A research of the Fuzzy Front-End activities of Japanese enterprises showed that the successful enterprises do two more activities than their counter parts: contact with consumers often and integrated the information and consumer needs into precut concept development.In a era of experience economy, companies should change their minds first for their products and service innovation, not simply depend on a single department to hold the NPD, but also under the experience design theory integrate different resources of designers, process and needs research model, etc, predict consumer needs in the niche market and create new selling points with better using and consuming experience. As domestic research of this topic ago was from the engineering and marketing perspectives which lacked the experience design perspective, companies didn't pay attention on design, didn't know what design can make to help create values for companies and say nothing of consumer needs research.This essay uses the literature research and case analysis methods to have a look at the behavior of Japanese companies in new product concepts development, the difference of successful and unsuccessful companies in the these activities; then, with the experience design theory, methods and process, the author talk about the execution of needs research and the analysis tools. In the end, on the basis of analyzing three cases of different product concepts development activities in different industries, this essay compare each on the team and process management with deep study of the execution of needs research.After comparing with the common product concept development process, the author concluded with a new process and made some suggestions about it in three aspects: perspectives, organization structure and process. The conclusions are:1. There are three factors affecting the quality of concepts: creativity, participants and the process when using user needs analysis in the concept development process under the experience design perspective. All these three factors should be managed. Firstly, designers can help companies to guide an experience design in the opening stage; secondly, creative consumers are the representatives of the mass whose ideas are more preferable by companies and suitable to concepts.2. During the concept development in NPD, management should pay more attention to consumer/user needs research and in the execution activities, research goal driven, proper research methodology and good communication skills are suggested to hold a successful research.The creative points of the essay are:1. The innovation of research perspective: the author uses the experience design perspective to study the concept development which is seldom seen in domestic research areas.2. Empathize the importance of designers involving in the Fuzzy Front-End activities and point the reason.3. Make the conclusion on the project management perspective with some suggestions to management and researchers.