What is Your Business Orientation?
Being successful in business means determining a strategy and following that strategy to execute flawless operations. There are infinite choices of strategies from which a firm might select – some […]
Teresa Jurgens-Kowal
Process Improvement Projects
Quality has two major thrusts: customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. In delivering and meeting customer needs, we must constantly strive to improve the product offering itself as well as enhancing […]
Business Model Basics
Business models translate the long term goals of a firm’s strategy into the actionable plans for developing and launching a product in the market place. Organizations need to constantly review […]
Virtual Teams
Innovation work today, like all other projects, is done by cross-functional teams working in multiple locations. These virtual teams face a number of challenges – just as any team does […]
Becoming a Customer-Centric Supplier
This week’s blog post summarizes recent survey findings published by Chemical Week, “Gaining Local Perspectives on a Global Business.” A transcript of the study can be found here. In Spring […]
Customer Satisfaction
There was no shower curtain in the hotel room. My husband and I had taken off after work on a Friday to spend a weekend in the Texas Hill Country. […]
Organizational Environment
New product development (NPD) is most successful in an organizational culture that is open and flexible. We have recently described the characteristics of such firms that practice disruptive innovation. Disruptive […]
Balanced Scorecard
In engineering management and new product development (NPD), we must measure performance in order to determine success in achieving the goals of a project. Often, performance measures are financial in […]
Understanding Project Risk
New product development (NPD) projects are built with inherent risk. We don’t know if the markets will support the idea once it is commercialized. We don’t know if we can […]
Supply Chains in NPD
New product development (NPD) teams often focus on the customer. If there is no a customer need for a product, then it will not survive the marketplace and development efforts […]