Notice of RetractionFFE Innovation and NPD Performance: Some New Evidence from Innovating Chinese Companies

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

In this paper, we report on the results of typical front-end-related innovation practice in 253 Chinese mechanical and electrical engineering companies through large-scale studies. We explore typical activities concerning the generation and assessment of new product idea, the reduction of technological as well as market uncertainty and front end planning. Finally, we report on the differences between successful and unsuccessful companies. We also find companies to be intensively involving in upper management and customers on NPD projects. While integrating upper management is of vital importance for assessing new product ideas, integrating customers into users is primarily used to developing product ideas and concepts. We further find evidence that successful companies integrate their customers more frequently than non-successful companies in the process of developing and assessing new product ideas. In addition, the former integrate customer requirements into their product definitions more often and also translate these requirements into technical specifications more frequently than non-successful companies. Finally, successful companies more often systematically plan a project prior to its start than unsuccessful ones.