ABSTRACT
Design is a driving force for creating, developing and manufacturing innovative products. This fast-ever-changing landscape has resulted in fierce competition and advances in the field of new product development (NPD). This chapter describes the innovation process of iterative design, which takes products and services from an opportunity space to conceptualisation, engineering design, prototyping, and testing and implementation or launch. NPD is discussed as an interdisciplinary and iterative innovation approach that integrates strategies that make product development fit the emerging economies context. Customisation of NPD processes by infusing the tenets of Ubuntu philosophy enables entities, e.g., small and medium enterprises, to have greater control over the design process, thus ensuring successful product development. It also allows contextualisation of NPD to ensure that it addresses the needs of the market being served to avoid failure of superimposed approaches unrelated to the needs and problems of the intended stakeholders within a given context. The chapter concludes by developing and proposing an NPD process/model fused with the ethos of Ubuntu to inform design practice in emerging economies.
