Saskia van der Geest

Saskia van der Geest MSc. is an active consultant and coach in the field of New Product Development. She helps management teams to improve profitability and market share through setting up their organisations to predictably deliver a continuous stream of profitable high quality new products (or services) faster.

Saskia has successfully launched over one hundred products (and some businesses) onto the New Zealand market and with over 20 years of experience focusing on improving the new product development (NPD) process and over 13 years experience managing NPD projects in New Zealand she knows how to fast track the development and launch profitable projects.

She specialises in improving the product development process (from ideas to profits) to consistently deliver ‘faster, better, more profitable’. That is: better quality new products (or services), in shorter time frames, with reduced cost, higher margins and reduced risk. To make that happen successfully she works closely with the key team involved in creating new products for the market: the management team, the R&D team, operations, Sales & Marketing, QA and Engineering.

Clients range from medium size businesses to large multinational blue chip firms, who operate in a large range of industries from retailers, to manufacturers in the food & beverage, consumer goods, timber, health care, electronics and plastics industries, to government and the storage industry. Some of the well-known businesses that Saskia has worked with are: New Zealand King Salmon, Barkers of Geraldine, Annabel Langbein Books, F&P Healthcare, Siemens, and GE Plastics.

Saskia was DB Breweries’ first NPD manager; she launched Monteith's Radler and the Heineken long neck bottle, both still high performing products since 2002. Saskia is backed by the rare mix of an MSc degree in Industrial Design Engineering from Technische Universiteit Delft (one of the best in Europe) and a marketing degree. Next to lecturing for the University of Auckland Saskia runs her own consultancy business, is a committee member of the International Product Development and Management Association in New Zealand and she mentors companies as a design coach in New Zealand Trade & Enterprises’ Better by Design programme (since 2010).