According to dictionary.com, sustain means to “strengthen or support physically or mentally; uphold, affirm, or confirm the justice or validity of.” To sustain a physical fitness level, for example, we need to continually push our bodies with aerobic and strength training. To sustain a given schedule, an airplane must fly at a certain speed and… Read More
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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 and revise business models in order to maintain a unique competitive advantage. Read the full article on our sister site
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 – but offer unique opportunities to accomplish sophisticated technical goals. Some of the unique challenges that a virtual team faces
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 2010, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and Accenture commissioned a study of about 1300 companies comprising the chemicals
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. Nothing special was planned except to hike at a nearby state park, sleep in, eat, drink, and relax. But we
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 Innovation Three Threats to Disruptive Innovation Technology in Disruptive Innovation One mistake firms can make with innovation programs
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 nature (see Economics of NPD in the Fuzzy Front End, for example). Financial metrics are, of course, important
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 design the technology to work in a new application. We don’t know if competitors might flood the product category with
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 are wasted. Customer need should be the number one objective for an NPD project. On the other hand, many firms
Design Thinking
“Design thinking” is an emerging topic in new product development (NPD). Many of the principles will be familiar to New Product Development Professionals (NPDPs) yet the packaging of the concepts allows us to take a novel approach to innovation. What is Design Thinking? At its core, design thinking
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