Accidental Discovery: New designs, ideas, and developments different from that originally hoped for from research.

Alpha Test: In-house testing of pre-production products to find and eliminate the most obvious design defects or deficiencies, either in a laboratory setting or in some part of the developing firm's regular operations. This can include SLA and other rapid prototype parts, systems, and soft tools. See also beta test.

As-Is Map: A version of a process map depicting how an existing process actually operates. This may differ substantially from documented guidelines.

Awareness: A measure of the percent of target customers who are aware of the new product's existence. Awareness is variously defined, including recall of brand, recognition of brand, recall of key features or positioning.

Benchmarking: A process of studying successful competitors (or organizations in general) and selecting the best of their actions or standards. In the new product program it means finding the best development process methods and the best process times to market and setting out to achieve them.

Benefit: A product attribute expressed in terms of what the user gets from the product rather than its physical characteristics or features. Benefits are often paired with specific features, but they need not be. They are perceived, not necessarily real.
Beta Test: An external test of pre-production products. The purpose is to test the product for all functions in a breadth of field situations to find those system faults that are more likely to show in actual use than in the firm's more controlled in-house tests before sale to the general market. See also alpha test. A significant amount of the product parts is production ready.”

Bill of Materials (BOM): A listing of all subassemblies, intermediate parts and raw materials that go into a parent assembly showing the quantity of each required to make an assembly.

Brainstorming: A group method of problem-solving used in product concept generation, there are many modifications in format of use, each variation with its own name.

Brand: A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller.
Brand Development Index (BDI): A measure of the relative strength of a brand's sales in a geographic area. Computationally BDI is the percent of total national brand sales which occur in an area divided by the percent of US households which reside in that area.

Breadboard: A proof-of-concept modeling technique that represents how a product will work, but not how a product will look.

Business Case: The results of the business analysis, or up-front homework. Ideally defined just prior to the "go to development" decision (gate), the case defines the product and project, including the project justification and the action or business plan.

Business Management Team: Top functional managers and business unit head who work together throughout the design of the decision-flow component of a stage-gate process.

Buyer: The purchaser of a product, whether or not they will be the ultimate user. Especially in business-to-business markets, a purchasing agent may contract for the actual purchase of a good or service, yet never benefit from the function(s) purchased.

Buyer Concentration: The degree to which purchasing power is held by a relatively small percentage of the total number of buyers in the market.

Cannibalization: When the demand for a new product arises at least in part by eroding demand for (sales of) a current product the firm markets.

Capacity Planning: A forward-looking activity which monitors the skill sets and effective resource capacity of the organization.

Champion: A person who takes an inordinate interest in seeing that a particular process or product is fully developed and marketed. The role varies from situations calling for little more than stimulating awareness of the opportunity to extreme cases where the champion tries to force a project past the strongly entrenched internal resistance of company policy or that of objecting parties.

Checklist: A memory-jogger list of items used to remind an analyst to think of all relevant aspects. It finds frequent use as a tool of creativity in concept generation, as a factor consideration list in concept screening, and to ensure that all appropriate tasks have been completed in any stage of the product development process.

Co-location: The physical locating of project personnel in one area, enabling more rapid and frequent communication among them.

Computer Assisted Design: A technology that allows designers and engineers to use computers for their design work.

Concept: A clear written and possibly visual description of the new product idea which includes its primary features and consumer benefits.

Concept Generation: The act by which new concepts, or product ideas, are generated. Sometimes also called idea generation or ideation.

Concept Optimization: A research approach that evaluates how specific product benefits or features contribute to a concept's overall appeal to consumers. Results are used to select from the options investigated to construct the most appealing concept from the consumer's perspective.

Concept Statement: A verbal or pictorial statement of a concept that is prepared for presentation to consumers to get their reaction prior to development.

Concept Testing: The process by which a concept statement is presented to consumers for their reactions. These reactions can either be used to permit the developer to estimate the sales value of the concept or to make changes to the concept to enhance its potential sales value.

Concurrency: Carrying out separate stages of the product development process at the same time rather than sequentially.

Concurrent Engineering: When product design and manufacturing process development occur concurrently or simultaneously rather than sequentially. Also called simultaneous engineering.

Conjoint Analysis: A quantitative market research technique which determines how consumers make trade-offs between a small number of different features or benefits.
Consumer: The most generic and all-encompassing term for a firm's targets. The term is used in either the business-to-business or household context and may refer to the firm's current customers, competitors' customers, or current non-purchasers with similar needs or demographic characteristics. The term does not differentiate between whether the person is a buyer or a user target. Only a fraction of consumers will become customers.

Consumer Market: The purchasing of goods and services by individuals and for household use (rather than for use in business settings). Consumer purchases are generally made by individual decision-makers either for themselves or others in the family.

Consumer Need: A problem the consumer would like to have solved. What a consumer would like a product to do for them.

Consumer Panels: Specially recruited groups of consumers whose longitudinal category purchases are recorded either by hand or via scanner technology.

Continuous Learning Activity: The set of product development tasks involving an objective examination of how a product development project is progressing or how it was carried out to permit process changes to simplify its remaining steps or improve the product being developed or its schedule.

Controlled Store Testing:  A method of test marketing where specialized companies are employed to handle product distribution and auditing, rather than a company's normal sales force.

Convergent Thinking: A technique generally performed in the initial phase of ideas generation to help funnel the high volume of ideas created through divergent thinking into a small group or single idea on which more effort will be focused.

Coordination Matrix: A summary chart that identifies the key stages of a development project, their goals, and key activities within each stage.

Core Benefit Proposition (CBP): The central benefit or purpose for which a consumer buys a product. The CBP may come either from the physical good or service performance, or it may come from the augmented dimensions of the product.

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): The direct costs associated with producing a product.
Criteria: Statements of standards used by gatekeepers at each gate and related to all organizational functions. The criteria are what are necessary to achieve or surpass for product development projects to continue in development. In the aggregate, these criteria reflect a business unit's new product strategy.

Cross Sections: An explanation of a part that is referenced by slicing through the area that needs to be explained.

Customer: One who purchases or uses your firm's products or services.