Nowadays, the increasing competitiveness inside the markets has ended up in a huge necessity by companies to improve and accelerate the development of new products. It is for that reason that distinguishing the different types of projects and treating them accurately according to their own needs is essential in order to save costs and resources, thus making a good product performance and remaining and even increasing their market share. In this thesis some theoretical and practical approach is going to be presented about which are the determinant factors in order to decide whether a project requires a whole implementation of New Product Development or whether it needs a fast track process using Rapid Development concept. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to study which are the main differences and similarities between these two processes, and how these two concepts are understood inside the companies. This work has been carried out by doing a literature review of the topic in order to define the theoretical framework, and by studying the case of 4 companies, making interviews and analyzing the collected data so as to see how they understand and apply these processes in practice. As a result, this thesis defines both processes finally making a list of their main determinant factors. Furthermore, it joins these theoretical findings with the data acquired in the interviews detecting that the companies have not a differentiated standardized RaDe process yet although the majority of them understand the importance of having one to improve the company’s performance. On the other hand, it has been detected that the companies who have stronger criteria about that concept seem to be the ones who are having less difficulties on building a more defined path to implement a separate process for fast track projects.

Outgoing