International audience To be competitive, a new product should present an innovative advantage while being achievable. To ensure the success of a New Product Development (NPD) project, specific skills and resources are required. Most often, if a product is complex, a unique company doesn't have all the competences to provide the complete product. In this case alliances must be formed to create a collaborative network that work on the new project. Depending on the selected partners, different possible innovation level can be reached. This decision also influences the uncertainty and the risk of the project. It is difficult to assess the risk level of a NPD project especially when the collaborative network is new. In this paper we address the topic of alliance making in NPD and we present a reading frame of the projects by taking into account the type of innovative projects, the possible network and the risk that are obviously inherent. The originality of the paper is to consider correlate decisions focused on the collaborative network and on the risk management in innovation context. The objective of the paper is to establish the process making the ling between network design, NPD project planning and risk management in order to have an overview of the repercussion of the network design on NPD project.