New Product Development as a Strategic Renewal Mechanism for Sustainable Business: A Two-Pillar Audit Framework Integrating Internal Capability and Consumer Adoption

Abstract

Abstract—Positive FMCG value growth can coexist with slower category momentum, contracting volume, and weaker purchase frequency. This paper argues that sustainable growth therefore depends not only on responsible intent, but on a firm’s repeatable ability to renew its portfolio with offers that consumers can understand, afford, adopt, and continue buying. The study develops and content-validates a two-pillar New Product Development (NPD) audit framework for FMCG. Pausits’ innovation-audit model provides the parent architecture: innovation capacity captures repeatable organizational capability, while innovation success captures consumer and market response. The capacity pillar is operationalized through NPD best-practice dimensions and the success pillar through a consumer-adoption funnel. Commercial outcomes remain external evidence to avoid circularity. Thirty senior FMCG and innovation practitioners, all reporting more than 15 years of experience, evaluated six criteria. Of 180 criterion-level judgments, 176 were Valid, two Partially Valid, and two Not Valid, yielding a 97.8% support rate. The contribution is a transparent management system that separates capability, adoption, and alignment gaps so managers can identify the binding constraint before allocating further resources or scaling an NPD. Firm-level scores, causal tests, and final typology-specific weights are outside this framework paper. The framework is strengthened with an S-NPD lens that embeds environmental, social, and economic criteria across the NPD process and reads Consumer Adoption as a journey from awareness to sustained use; these theory-led refinements extend, but were not separately tested in, the reported expert validation.

Keywords—new product development, sustainable business, innovation audit, internal capability, consumer adoption, sustainable NPD.