ABSTRACT
New-product development is one area of strategic decision-making. This chapter deals with the process of decision-making in Japanese corporations. It focuses on the detailed analysis of more than fifteen cases and mail questionnaire surveys conducted in 1980. Japanese corporations have been successful world-wide in developing new products in the shipbuilding industry, watches, electrical home appliances even in the car industry although many original patents for the new products have been bought from foreign countries. New-product development is different from the routine operation of production and sales. The domestic market may be dangerous to extend the analogy to the world market, but one assumes that the same factors can in fact be applied to the products that are sold in world markets. There are several stages in the development of a new product: collection of information on general opportunity and threat, building basic policy, generation of new-product idea, technical development, commercial development, and capital investment for mass production and mass sales.
