Background: Economic evaluation as an integral part of health technology assessment is today mostly applied to established technologies. Evaluating healthcare innovations in their early states of development has recently attracted attention. Although it offers several benefits, it also holds methodological challenges.

Objectives: The aim of our study was to investigate the possible contributions of economic evaluation to industry's decision making early in product development and to confront the results with the actual use of early data in economic assessments.

Methods: We conducted a literature research to detect methodological contributions as well as economic evaluations that used data from early phases of product development.

Results: Economic analysis can be beneficially used in early phases of product development for various purposes including early market assessment, R&D portfolio management, and first estimations of pricing and reimbursement scenarios. Analytical tools available for these purposes have been identified. Numerous empirical works were detected, but most do not disclose any concrete decision context and could not be directly matched with the suggested applications.

Conclusions: Industry can benefit from starting economic evaluation early in product development in several ways. Empirical evidence suggests that there is still potential left unused.