Groups of German domestic appliance manufacturers according to new product development practices

Finding the best way to develop new products has been always a hot topic for practitioners and academics. However, so far only a few of these kinds of studies have concentrated on a single industry. In this paper, we group German domestic appliance manufacturers with regards to their new product development (NPD) practices to discover their attitude to NPD effort. By conducting a survey we found that three different groups of manufacturers can be distinguished, i.e. big leaders, good SME’s, SME’s doing little, who differ in level of NPD performance. Overall, our results show that high engagement in the NPD practices under investigation pays and some specific practices are better than others in the domestic appliance industry.