ion), the New Product Develop- ment (NPD) is defined as the overall process of strategy, organization, concept generation, product and marketing plan creation and evaluation, and commercialization of a new product [8]. 12.4.1 NPD Process Literature supports the fact that NPD is influenced positively by adopting a well defined development process with gates and metrics linked to business goals for decision making. The reason behind the need for a development process is the time constraint in NPD. New products need to be introduced to the market at a given time. In order to manage the scheduling and risk involved in new products, companies must follow an effective NPD process. Figure 12.4 provides a pictorial view of NPD where it shows the different components that are involved in the process. The process starts with a concept that leads to R&D and then to testing and system engineering and followed by manufacturing. From manufacturing it moves towards sales and distribution and finally the product is handed over to the service providers and end users [10]. It should be noted that it is not just material and information that is flowing as in the production network, it is also technology and performance criteria that moves from link to link or stage to stage. A key factor in the success is the readiness of the NPD process to support that last and vital technology and product transfer to the end customer. Though this transfer may happen over and over as each specific customer acquires the new product, the transfers in the vendor organizations NPD process may only happen once. 12.4.2 Collaborative Product Development (CPD) A key and newer element to the picture is the collaborative product development angle which comes to existence due to the ever-increasing global competition and great progress in information technolo- gies. Collaborative product development is involved in complicated interactions among enterprises, in a distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic environment, including cooperation, coordination, and comm