Published: 05 July 2023
Many R&D leaders struggle to accurately and consistently evaluate projects in the early stages of new product development. By tailoring their assessment criteria and approach, R&D teams can more effectively prioritize early-stage ideas and increase projects’ likelihood of success.
Strategic fit, sales and revenue potential, alignment to customer needs, technical feasibility, and capability fit are some of the criteria most commonly used to evaluate early-stage projects.
With incremental and next-generation projects, R&D leaders often focus on estimating financial metrics such as anticipated revenue as well as estimating a project’s development timeline and resource requirements.
Traditional revenue-driven criteria are ill-suited for evaluating higher-risk, higher-uncertainty transformational projects, particularly in the early stages of development. Instead, incorporating criteria such as transferable lessons and disruption potential helps R&D leaders account for the inherent unpredictability of transformational outcomes.
R&D leaders responsible for new product development
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