The pre-development process implementation of product innovation: A Malaysian food and beverage manufacturing SMEs survey

INTRODUCTION The current competitive market is characterized by intense domestic and global competition, constant changes in consumer demand, and rapid technology development. This scenario has made existing product quickly obsolete because the product life cycle is getting shorter. In order to survive in this competitive market, manufacturing is increasingly dependent on the continuous development and introduction of new products. Numerous gurus in the new product development (NPD) field have agreed with the significant impact of pre-development activities to new product success (Herstatt and Verworn, 2004; Verworn, Herstatt, and Nagahira, 2008). Pre-development process referred to the earliest stage of the NPD process. It's consisting three main activities such as idea generation, product definition, and finally project evaluation. The pre-development activities play an important role in determines which projects will be executed in manufacturing process. Quality, costs, and development time of end product are mostly defined during this process. In conjunction of that, manufacture will be more successful in their effort to develop new product if there have a deeper understanding of pre-development process. Figure 1, illustrate the position of pre-development activities in NPD process. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] There is a lot of literature available that deals with the pre-development process in large scale industries (Herstatt and Verworn, 2004; Kim and Wilemon, 2002; Koen et al., 2001; Verworn et al., 2008). However, there is a lack of empirical research to identify the pre-development practice for product development in SMEs. The objective of this research is to identify the practice of formal pre-development activities among Malaysian manufacturing SMEs. There is a need to identify the practice of pre-development activities in SMEs due to their role in the economy growth, and the potential for employment. The objective of this study is to identify pre-development process implementation in Malaysian manufacturing SMEs. For this purpose, this paper is organized as follows: Part two provides description on a research methodology, and the finding concerning predevelopment process implementation is presented in section 3. The final part concludes the paper, and suggests further research. METHODOLOGY We review literature about pre-development activities (Khurana and Rosenthal, 1997; Koen et al., 2001; McAdam and McClelland, 2002; Murphy and Kumar, 1996) in order to collect information on stages and activities undertaken prior to the development of new product. The activities found in the literatures, and suitable with SMEs characteristic were configured into a questionnaire. SMEs having different characteristics compare than large organizations. In view of that, Pre-development practice and approach in large organizational cannot be simplified applied in the SMEs (McAdam, Keogh, Reid, and Mitchell, 2007). Besides that, SMEs have limitation in terms of knowledge, resources, experience, and skills to become more innovative (Freel, 2000). In view of that, development of appropriate pre-development questionnaire which takes into account the SMEs characteristics, and limitations is needs. The initial draft of questionnaire was pre-tested to ensure the questions are suitable with SMEs practices as well as can be easily understood by respondent. In the first step, exploratory interviews were conducted with five industries leader which are successful in producing food and beverage. The purpose of the interviews, were to ensure that all perspectives are taken into account and the questionnaire included all necessary practice. After the interview, several items were eliminated, and reclassified to improve the quality of questionnaire. In the second step, two university's professors and a chairman of the Accreditation Unit of the Co-operative and Entrepreneurship Development Institute (CEDI) were ask to gone through the questionnaire to enhance the language, and statement used in the questionnaire. …