Winning at New Products ^{3rd Ed.}

For over a decade, Winning at New Products has served as the bible for product developers everywhere. In this fully updated and expanded edition, Robert Cooper demonstrates with compelling evidence why consistent product development is so vital to corporate growth and how to maximize your chances of success. Winning at New Products cites the author's most recent research and showcases innovative practices at such industry leaders as 3M, Exxon Chemical, and Guinness to present a field-tested game plan for achieving product leadership. Cooper outlines specific strategies for making sound business decisions at every step — from idea generation to launch, including:

• picking the winners — making essential "go" vs. "kill" decisions
• engaging customers in the pre-development discovery phase
• evaluating your project portfolio
• building in the voice of the customer
• developing market launch plans
• accelerating speed-to-market

1. Winning Is Everything
• New Products Warfare
• New Products: The Key to Corporate Prosperity
• Beating the Odds
• What’s New About a New Product?
• Performance and innovativeness
• An Introduction to the Game
2. New Products: Problems and Pitfalls
• Skeletons in Our Closets
• Analyzing Failure
• Our Projects Studies: Why New Products Fail
• What Really happens in Typical New Product Projects?
• A Step-by-Step Description
• Quality Is Missing
• Where the Resources Are Spent
• Problems and Pitfalls
• From Losers to Winners
3. What Separates the Winners from the Losers?
• The Right Products Right
• The Keys to New Product Success
• Success Versus Failure
• Winners Versus Losers: Mores Recent NewProd Studies
• Benchmarking Studies of Best Practices
• What Makes A Winner?
4. Lessons for Success: The Critical Success Factors
• Fifteen Critical Success Factors
• Toward a Stage-Gate® New Product Process
5. The New Product Process: The Stage-Gate
• Game Plan
• Stage-Gate Systems
• Seven Goals of a New Product Process
• Managing Risk
• The Stage-Gate Process
• An Overview of the Stage-Gate Process
• What the Stage-Gate Process is Not!
• Built-in Success Factors
• Speeding Up the Process: The Third-Generation Process
• What About Fundamental Research Projects or Platform Developments?
• Toward a Winning New Product Process
6. Discovery: The Quest for Breakthrough Ideas
• The Discovery Stage: Ideation
• A Strategic Outlook-Look for Disruptions in Your Customer’s Industry
• Use Voice of Customer Research to Uncover New Opportunities
• Work with Lead or Innovative Customers
• Fundamental Research Breakthroughs — Changing the Basis of Competition
• Harness the Creative Ability of Your Entire Organization
7. The Early Game: From Discovery to Development
• On to Stage 1: Scoping
• On to Stage 2: Building the Case
• On to Development
8. Picking the Winners: Effective Gates and Portfolio
• Management
• The Right Projects Right
• Three Approaches to Project Selection: A Quick Look
• Popularity, Strengths and Weaknesses of Project Selection Methods
• A Closer Look at Benefits Measurement Approaches
• A Closer Look at Economic Models
• Designing the Go/Kill Decision Points
• The Gatekeepers
• But It’s More Than Just Project Selection
• Different Goals, Different Portfolio Tools
• Putting the Portfolio Tools to Work
• Just Do It!
9. Development, Testing and Validation
• On to Stage 3: Development
• Seek Customer Input Throughout the Development Stage
• Shortening Development Times
• Parallel Actions During Stage
• On to Stage 4: Testing and Validation
• Go for Launch
10. The Final Play — Into the Market
• The Marketing Plan
• Setting marketing Objectives
• The Situation Size-Up
• Defining the Target Market
• Product Strategy
• The Supporting Elements of the Market Launch Plan
• Advertising and Marketing Communications: Getting the Message Across
• Sales Force Decisions
• Other Supporting Strategies
• Marketing Planning and the Stage-Gate New Product Process
• The Final Step: The “Financials”
11. Implementing the Stage-Gate New Product Process in Your Company
• Let’s Implement Stage-Gate 310
• The Nature and Use of the New Product Process
• Designing and Implementing a Stage-Gate Process
• Stage 1: The Foundation; Defining the Process Requirements
• Stage 2: Detailed Design of Your Stage-Gate Process
• Stage 3: Implementation
• Ten Ways to Fail!
• A Final Thought on Implementation
12. A Product Innovation and Technology Strategy for Your Business
• Win the Battle, Lose the War?
• The Importance of a Product Innovation Strategy for Your Business
• What Is a Product Innovation Strategy?
• Why Have a Product Innovation Strategy at All?
• The Evidence in Support of a Strategy
• The #2 Cornerstone of Performance: A Clear and Well-Communicated New Product Strategy for the Business
• Strategy Types: Prospectors, Analyzers, Defenders, Reactors
• Winning Product Innovation Strategies and Their Performance Impacts
• Developing a Product Innovation Strategy for Your Business: Setting Goals
• Defining Target Arenas for Your Business
• Prioritizing: Defining the Spending Splits
• Developing Key Attacks
• Key Points for Management
• Putting Your Product innovation Strategy to Work
• Some Final Thoughts on New Product Strategy

This is a very over-rated book. It isn't really about Product Development, more about Product Management. And the author manages to make an interesting subject very boring by being very verbose.

I am sure there are gems inside it (it claims to the be originator of Stage-Gate, but like many things in this book, you become unsure…), but I can't find them. And also, it has a very large bias towards traditional product-oriented companies, and seems to mostly disregard the service sector.

Unreadable, unless you're into Product Management, and even then it is a bit boring.