RELEVANCE OF ASSESSING THE CONSUMER NEEDS AT THE FRONT-ENDS IN A NPD PROJECT

Companies working in new product development suffer from a high failure level in their project development. New project development usually contains high amount of uncertainty coming from different sources: consumer preferences and needs, environment changes, regulations, competitors' behaviour… One way to manage these uncertainties is to focus on the upstream phases of the project. More and more, the Front-End modelling of the upstream phases is accepted and used. Our aim is to help companies in handling the uncertainties at the beginning of the Front-End tasks, by providing them with a methodology to assess the consumer needs.