New product development

Summary

In business and engineering, product development or new product development (PD or NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market. The product can be tangible (something physical which one can touch) or intangible (like a service or experience), though sometimes services and other processes are distinguished from "products."NPD requires an understanding of customer needs and wants, the competitive environment, and the nature of the market. Cost, time, and quality are th

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_product_development

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Creative-Learning Innovation Cycle - CLIC

Vincent Nassar

WHY do certain leaders’ management of organizational resources encourage creative people engaged in New Product Development (NPD) to achieve high performance, on time, while other leaders’ practices foster frustration and delays? In this research project I attempt to understand the WHY and HOW of leaders’ management of organizational resources in the context of Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenon of Flow. Flow is most likely to occur when people perceive a balance between the challenge of a situation and their professional abilities to deal with the challenge. “Being in the flow” increases peoples’ focus and attention, the latter being a prerequisite for high creativity, on the tasks and problems at hand and boosts their commitment to deliver their projects on time. Following the above-mentioned reasoning, I assume that if leaders manage organizational resources to create an optimal balance between challenging situations and the skills of their creative people, these managerial practices would likely result in enhancing the output of the NPD process, and decreasing the delays, or, in other words, accelerating the NPD cycle. To explore this research question, first, I developed a conceptual model called CLIC: “Creative-Learning Innovation Cycle”. The CLIC is characterized by its uniqueness in highlighting the impact of the feedback received from the commercialization process on the managerial practices of leadership for creativity of the components of the work environment. The work environment directly affects the state of flow of creative people, and, subsequently, both the quality and speed of their learning and creativity processes. The CLIC combines Sanchez’s model of an organization’s learning process, Amabile’s componential theory of creativity, and, Csikszentmihalyi and Bakker’s State of Flow concept. Second, I tested the CLIC through two main research methods. I conducted exploratory and action research with a successful global innovation manager and two companies wrestling to accelerate their NPD processes in a changing work environment. The two companies deal with components and technological innovations. They differ in size, continent and products. Both companies innovate products related to health issues in an industry where high regulatory requirements are imposed. I also conducted a lab experiment in which 27 Masters students (18 males, 9 females) who were enrolled in an “Innovation Management” course voluntarily participated. The mean age was 23.5 years. The academic language was English. The exploration of the CLIC model in the course of conducting the comparative studies among the successful global innovation manager, the two companies, and the results of the lab experiment led to the emergence of a new theory about flow in work situations and organizational resources management. The theory defines and prioritizes five organizational resources that have to be managed during the NPD stages to let creative people experience a “state of flow” during their work. The foundation of the theory is that, following the impacts of feedback received from the external world, leaders’ managerial practices of organizational resources affect the state of flow of the people involved in the NPD process in an inverted U shape. Based on this inverted U shape and, as per the CLIC model, this theory prioritized the following five organizational resources to manage flow during the NPD stages: v A. Planning stage 1. Involving creative people in early market feedback during the planning stage would enhance their work absorption and their attention on the problems they are facing. B. Development stage 2. Putting creative people in direct communication with all the people who interact with the product and bring meaning to it, 3. Extending on a rational basis the time lines proposed by creative people, 4. And integrating the customer in the NPD process, mainly during testing phases, are likely to positively influence the intrinsic motivation of the creative people during the development stage. Hence, creative people would be committed to reach their goals by deploying their expertise to its utmost level without counting their working hours. C. Commercialization stage 5. Allow creative people to directly solicit and experience feedback from the VOC during the commercialization stage. This could constitute an enriching and joyful experience for them. In sum, the prioritization of these organizational resources during the NPD stages might constitute a beneficial roadmap to the managerial practices that should be used by leaders. The application of this theory by the leaders would regulate the balance between a challenging situation and the skills of the creative people, so the latter might be in the “state of flow”. Probable effects may be a boosted and an accelerated outcome of the NPD process, leading the organization to thrive in this seldom static world. Some leaders knew WHAT to do and HOW to enhance the creativity of their collaborators. However the understanding of the WHY that drives these managerial practices needed additional elucidation. This research project attempted to provide a potential answer to “WHY” leaders’ practices might enhance or hinder their collaborators’ state of flow; and, in finding the answer, it was thought that leaders and their collaborators may simultaneously enjoy work and savor life.

EPFL2012

Three distinct stages describe the technological evolution of a product over time: ferment, convergence on a dominant design and an era of incremental change. Until recently, the era of incremental change has been characterized as stable and one that involves low levels of technological innovation. However, recent studies have indicated that this era of incremental change may actually be quite disruptive. This raises the question as to which processes and mechanisms in new product development during the era of incremental change trigger high levels of innovation. First, this dissertation offers a conceptual study about how collaboration practices with suppliers characterized by a relatively high intensity shift the technological evolution away from the era of incremental change towards the stage of ferment. Second, a quantitative study of the medical technology industry in Europe reveals that involving suppliers in new product development during the era of incremental change may trigger technological novelties that are incorporated into new product architectures; A new product architecture shifts the technological evolution towards the era of ferment. According to the results of the second study, it appears that only by improving products based on established architectures are firms unable to innovate new technologies. Additionally, the stage of convergence on a dominant design has mainly been examined on the basis of technological convergence. However, a possible convergence on a dominant design away from the stage of ferment also involves a cognitive variable. Third, this study observes the cognitive variable while examining the nascent smartwatch market. Within a nascent market, firms within previously distinct domains compete with one another. Firms lack a better understanding of customer preferences and develop initial products based on assumptions that are rooted within their previous industry. This qualitative study illustrates that firms from the same prior industry conceptualize their products in a similar way with regard to nascent product features. Overall, this dissertation more deeply explores the product life-cycle of technological development, provides a better understanding of the dynamics during the era of incremental change, demonstrates how the technological life-cycle of a product may shift from one stage to the other and supplies additional explanations concerning how a dominant design may emerge out of the ferment stage of technological development.

EPFL2017

Knowledge-based decision support for improving the adaptive product development process

Predrag Spasojevic

The product development process (PDP) is a complex process encompassing many very diverse activities, and involving a fairly big number of actors, spread across different professions, teams and companies. In todayâs product development, more often than not these individual actors and groups of actors perform their duties almost isolated from the others, using their own methods and software tools to achieve their respective local goals within the overall development effort. Even though much of the same knowledge about the product is used in different phases and tasks of the PDP, in most cases it is not shared or structured in any formal manner, except locally in some cases. Instead, it is exchanged through meetings of the responsible people or other informal means. Current PDP support ICT solutions are focusing on specific parts of the process, but there is no integrated approach that includes product data and services required for the whole PDP, despite the knowledge commonalities shared by its parts and phases. Apart from that, information about the process itself (such as how the tasks are defined, planned and organized, which changes are made to a plan before and during the execution of the tasks, and based on which conditions are these decisions being made), is rarely kept or formally described, relying on the people and their memory. This lack of awareness about the process plans and execution among people responsible for different tasks within PDP leads to misunderstandings, collisions and delays arising much more often than necessary, and work being done in a suboptimal fashion. Having both the product and process knowledge captured, managed, shared and reused in a standardized manner would aid the process tremendously, by improving the collaboration between all the parties involved, making sure that the entire process and its individual tasks are executed at the right moment, with the correct resources, having minimal negative effect on the others, and with the best possible performance. This thesis presents an approach to reduce the impact of these issues, based on a PDP knowledge management and decision support software system. Ontologies, description logic and Semantic Web technologies are used to formalize the knowledge, enable reasoning and additional fact inferencing, as well as to make it easier to access by both machine and human actors in the PDP. As a first step, a general model of the PDP was created, based on detailed descriptions of product development processes in six companies from three different industry branches (aerospace, automotive and home appliances). In accordance with the model, a broad PDP ontology was designed and implemented, as part of a collaborative effort with other research institutes and companies. The ontology provides the formal structure for the knowledge encountered during the PDP by describing the relevant classes, properties and relations. In addition, the architecture of the ontology-centered knowledge base and the adjoining support software framework is described, showing relevant implementation details and features for supporting PDP planning and execution. They give insight into the benefits of applying the Semantic Web technologies in the product development domain, and how they provide the basis for improving the PDP. The benefits are reflected in shorter PDP project times and better results, which come from knowledge capture and reuse, improved collaboration, faster reaction and [...]

EPFL2015