New textile product development: Processes, practices, and products

With today's global competitive marketplace, new textile product development requires a design, marketing, materials and technology interface. An opportunity existed to examine the new textile product development processes being used by global textile companies with a variety of textile product end-uses: apparel, home textiles, transportation, industrial, nonwovens, carpets, and medical textiles. The Crawford and DiBenedetto model (2003) was used as the conceptual framework for the study and data was collected using secondary and primary data sources. A total of 24 global companies, based in the United States, comprised the sample for this study. Each company's new textile product development processes, practices, and new products were examined, with identification of key new product development concepts being utilized. Results indicated that companies were utilizing new product development (NPD) processes as a competitive tool, but are using a combination of NPD strategies to develop and launch products in the global marketplace.