Feasibility Evaluation of High - Tech New Product Development Projects Using Support Vector Machines

New product development (NPD) is defined as the transformation of a market opportunity and a set of assumptions about product technology into a product available for sale. Managers charged with project selection decisions in the NPD process, such as go/no-go choices and specific resource allocation decisions, are faced with a complicated problem. Therefore, the ability to develop new successful products has identifies as a major determinant in sustaining a firm's competitive advantage. The purpose of this study is to develop a new evaluation model for NPD project selection in the high-tech industry using support vector machines (SVM). The evaluation model is developed through two phases. In the first phase, binary (go/no-go) classification prediction model, i.e. SVM for high-tech NPD project selection is developed. In the second phase. using the predicted output value of SVM, feasibility grade is calculated for the final NPD project decision making. In this study, the feasibility grades are also divided as three level grades. We assume that the frequency of NPD project cases is symmetrically determined according to the feasibility grades and misclassification errors are partially minimized by the multiple grades. However, the horizon of grade level can be changed by firms' NPD strategy. Our proposed feasibility grade method is more reasonable in NPD decision problems by considering particularly risk factor of NPD in viewpoints of future NPD success probability. In our empirical study using Korean NPD cases, the SVM significantly outperformed ANN and logistic regression as benchmark models in hit ratio. And the feasibility grades generated from the predicted output value of SVM showed that they can offer a useful guideline for NPD project selection.