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Experimentation Throughout the Product Development Process - Lessons from Food and Beverage Ventures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Abstract

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Established companies turn to new ventures for bolstering exploration activities, but we know relatively little of the product development processes of startups and new ventures and how different stakeholders are utilized in these. The current study investigated the product development activities and experiments of eight Finnish food and beverage ventures in a multiple case study based on 22 interviews. How the developed products fit into the existing portfolio and experience of the ventures seemed to define their enacted development process. Internal experimentation was a constant feature, although the type of experiments varied between different phases of the development process. External-facing experiments were less frequent and more for validation than concept generation. On the other hand, they also carried important market creation functionalities. The results suggest that more nuanced terminology around experimentation would be useful to determine what type of experiments serve different goals in the development process.

Type
Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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