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Top1. Introduction
Today's enterprises are facing fierce competition from domestic and foreign organizations (Fixson 2009). To that end, the development of new products and services is seen as a core activity of an organization’s competitive strategy, which includes concept design and the successful development of new products that can be launched in the market. While enterprises come under pressure to develop innovative products, the process of new product development is extremely challenging (Wowak et al. 2016). Statistics show that the new product development failure rate for established firms is between 40% and 65%, while for startup companies it exceeds 90% (Castellion and Markham 2013). Scholars estimate that approximately 3,000 original ideas are needed to produce a successful new commercial product (Stevens and Burley 1997).
In entrepreneurship, the commercialization of business ideas has become both a core issue and a major challenge. Although extant research has created masses of knowledge in the new product development area, prior work shares a commonality of being set in the context of the firm level. Compared with other subjects in the field of business management, such as marketing, entrepreneurship, and social responsibility, studies on the development and teaching methods of new product development courses are relatively limited (Violante and Vezzetti 2017). According to a survey on technology management courses by Mallick and Chaudhury (2000), scholars and administrators both agree that new product development is a key skill. The coverage of new product development has been continuously expanding across various fields, including, but not limited to, innovation, product design, finance, teamwork, manufacturing, and marketing. The development of new products and services has a complex procedure, which makes it difficult for scholars to design a curriculum that suits a practical purpose. Furthermore, the majority of current new product development textbooks available to the public fail to meet the current requirements of innovation and practical guidance, and therefore, do not satisfy the demands of business society.
As emphasized by Leung et al. (2009), a comprehensive curriculum generally contains accessible goals, content, teaching, and evaluation methods. Additionally, the curriculum design not only encompasses the considerations of learning needs and objectives (Modo and Kinchin 2011) but must also address the views and concerns of different stakeholders (Bertucio 2017). Therefore, this study aims to introduce a methodology that integrates a latent semantic analysis, revised Bloom’s taxonomy, and the modified Delphi method in furthering curriculum design on the new product development course. The results of this study can enhance students learning performance and competency in entrepreneurship education and further the research field in the education sector.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical foundation of the study. Section 3 presents the knowledge and methods of the proposed methodology in a nutshell. A demonstration of the application of the proposed methodology is presented in Section 4. The discussion and explanation of the results are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and provides suggestions for further research.