The Role of Design Freeze in Product Development

“Freezes” play a major role during product development. Many companies use high-level stage-gateway processes for new product development (NPD), where freezes mark the end point of a development stage: for example, “specification freeze” defines the set of requirements the entire design will be based on, and “design freeze” describes the end point of the design phase at which a technical product description is handed over to production. However, academia seems to have paid little attention to freezes. While freezes are important to industry, only a few papers comment on freezes and describe their use, benefits and drawbacks.

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