New products are critical to the growth and survival of most corporations. Success or failure of a new product has been found to be derermined by the new product development process(NPDP), communications among members of the new product development team and so forth. Expert systems or Decision Support Systems to evaluate new product alternatives have been developed. And packages which support many models in the NPDP has been used. But, systems to manage all the new product development steps have not been developed yet.
In this thesis, we propose the NPDP model to integrate Cooper's stage-gate model and Urban & Hauser's model and summarize models to use in the new product development steps. A conceptual architecture to support the new product development process is suggested. The architecture is focused on supporting full steps of NPDP and communication among project team members. A prototype system is implemented based on the suggested architecture. Especially, we implement systems for two important models - Analytic Hierarchy Process and Quality Function Deployment - in order to use in the NPDP.
