Critical success factors for new product development in the Hong Kong toy industry

Hong Kong's manufacturers have become some of the world's most efficient toy producers, and are also the world's biggest exporter of toys. However, the Hong Kong toy industry is mainly Original Engineering Manufacturing (OEM) and does not invest large amounts in R&D activities such as the development of new toy designs and the creation of new toys. With increasing competition front Mainland China and other Asian countries, it is important for Hong Kong, companies to invest more in R&D and to develop their own design capabilities or more value-added edges which cannot be substituted easily by their competitors. Therefore, this research paper aims to explore the critical success factors (CSFs) for new product development (NPD) in the Hong Kong toy industry, and, novelly, examines both the project and functional levels. Using the Biblical Metaphor Model, this research identifies a group of critical success factors for each phase of NPD. Moreover, the research also reveals which factors have been implemented and which have not. The implications from this research, therefore, are rather obvious, and companies should be able to easily identify the areas in which improvement is needed in the future. Since the research is custom-designed for the Hong Kong toy industry, and previous research indicates that NPD is both country- and industry-specific, the specific results should not be applied to other industries in other countries. However, the actual research design and data analysis framework could be used to investigate the same problem in other industries. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.