Shorter product life cycles and increasing market competition have driven firms to cut their development times and accelerate the introduction of new products into the market. Deviations from the target can lead to significant economic consequences. The use of new technologies and implementation of innovative approaches entail the risk that unexpected problems in the development and manufacturing process may arise. The literature review presented in this paper is based on a co-citation analysis and should help to understand the linkage between different research areas in the field of product launch. The co-citation analysis is a common tool for examining a body of literature and produces cluster-enhanced multidimensional scaling maps to visualize the subject's relatedness in an interdisciplinary literature field. An analysis of various research streams in the interdisciplinary field of ramp-up is essential to create a better understanding of critical causes of delay in launching a new product, the correlation between factors that influence the ramp-up performance and possible gaps in the research.
