Selecting ideas for new product development

Purpose – New product concept screening, i.e., selecting a few viable innovative concepts from numerous candidates, involves high stakes and is complicated and resource intensive. Over the years, there has been heated debate about the relative merit of monadic (sequential) tests vs that of preference-based paired comparisons. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This study proposes the Generalizability Theory as a framework to assess and compare the performance of traditional monadic test with the Adaptive Concept Screening (ACS) in terms of their testing results and psychometric quality. Findings – Using 50 yogurt concepts and two independent groups of respondents, the results indicate that ACS requires a significant smaller sample of respondents to achieve a necessary minimum G coefficient for decision making. Moreover, ACS offers a more discriminating and reliable solution for early stage concept screening as manifested by a higher G coefficient and greater percentage of variance due to the selected concepts given the same sampling design. Practical implications – The results lend strong support to ACS as a more cost-effective method for screening new product concepts and the Generalizability Theory as a systematic framework for assessing concept testing methods. Originality/value – This study adopts the Generalizability Theory framework to assess the validity of new product concept screening method.