TY - GEN U1 - Studien- und Projektarbeit A1 - Camilli, Sophia T1 - Integration of Sales Force into New Product Development N2 - Due to continuous changes in consumer needs, new product development (NPD) and innovation are some of a company’s key factors of success and competitiveness. In order to be successful, companies have to understand consumer needs and ‘translate them into new products’1. If changing consumer perceptions and their requirements are not respected by a firm, a product’s sales will decrease as people no longer feel satisfied with the old product and require new functions. Therefore, a major task in business is being close to the customer. In order to collect ideas about product perceptions, institutions and departments within a company staying in direct contact with consumers can be essential. One department that represents a customer-oriented sector is sales, as their day-to-day business includes communication with customers. However, failure rates of new product launches are still very high. According to a study of Serviceplan and Gfk where 265 newly launched products were analyzed, 70% of these failed and were no longer bought after only one year.2 A firm’s difficulties in generating ideas in the early stages of NPD have been ‘identified as major cause of notoriously high failure rates of new products’3. One possible reason is that information received by the sales department is not communicated clearly enough to Research & Development (R&D), which is in charge of developing new products. For this reason consumer needs are often not adequately integrated into the process of new product development and relevant information concerning their requirements can get lost. The question as to how the customer-oriented sales department can be better involved into the process of new product development in order to ensure the success of new product introductions will be discussed in the following. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:fn1-opus4-6171 UN - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:fn1-opus4-6171 SP - 12 S1 - 12 ER -