New New Product Development Game

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⏱ 5 min · 📅 2026

New New Product Development Game is the title of the article published in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review. It is the work that gave rise to the concept and name of Scrum: by comparing the new way of teamwork they observed with the forward movement of a scrum formation in rugby, the authors coined the term that Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland would turn into a software development framework in the following years.

Context and aim of the study

The authors opened the article with this observation:

Many companies have discovered that it takes more than the accepted basics of high quality, low cost, and differentiation to excel in today's competitive market. It also takes speed and flexibility.

Their study analyzed how new products were developed by companies that outperformed their competitors despite the dynamism of the industry: Fuji-Xerox, Canon, Honda, NEC, Epson, Brother, 3M, and Hewlett-Packard.

The products analyzed included:

The Fuji-Xerox FX-3500 photocopier (1978)
The Canon PC-10 personal copier (1982)
Honda's 1200cc city car (1981)
The NEC PC 8000 personal computer (1979)
The Canon AE-1 camera (1976)
The Canon Auto Boy camera (1979)

All were developed in less time than the industry average and delivered significant innovative value.

The central finding: overlapping phases

The main difference from the usual model was the overlapping of development phases. The traditional model works like a relay race: each department completes its phase and hands the result over to the next. The companies observed by Nonaka and Takeuchi worked in a radically different way: the phases were not chained together but overlapped so extensively that, for most of the development, all activities—requirements, analysis, coding, testing, integration—took place simultaneously.

Rather than sequential phases, they were activities carried out when they were needed, according to the needs of the project's evolution.

The six characteristics identified

The authors identified six characteristics shared by the teams that worked this way. These characteristics are also the ones described in the Scrum Field article:

Built-in uncertainty.
Self-organizing project teams.
Overlapping development phases.
Multilearning.
Subtle control.
Institutionalized transfer of knowledge.

From Nonaka and Takeuchi to Schwaber and Sutherland

In 1995 Ken Schwaber presented "Scrum Development Process" at the OOPSLA conference, a framework of rules for software development based on the principles described by Nonaka and Takeuchi, which he had used in the development of Delphi. Jeff Sutherland applied it in parallel at Easel Corporation. Together, they formalized what we know today as Scrum.

Common mistake

Believing that Nonaka and Takeuchi's article describes a software method. The study was carried out in hardware technology manufacturing companies, not in software development teams. The authors identified teamwork patterns applicable to any innovation process with high uncertainty. Schwaber and Sutherland's adaptation of it to software came later; the original article addresses product development in a broad sense.

References

Imai, Ken'ichi; Nonaka, Ikujiro; Takeuchi, Hirotaka. (1984). "Managing the New Product Development Process: How Japanese Companies Learn and Unlearn". Division of Research, Harvard Business School.
Takeuchi, Hirotaka; Nonaka, Ikujiro. (1986). "The New New Product Development Game". Harvard Business Review, January–February 1986.