Top product development companies gain competitive advantage by bringing rapidly evolving technologies to increasingly fragmented markets with speed, efficiency, and high quality. What is more, they use the talents from across the organization and those of suppliers, distributors, and customers to do it.
This collection of articles and interviews from the Harvard Business Review further explores how these companies succeed, identifying strong leadership and a high degree of integration as the distinctive characteristics of organizations that achieve outstanding results from product development efforts. Featuring contributions from scholars and business leaders such as Ralph Gomory, Fumio Kodama, Edward McCracken, and the members of the Manufacturing Vision Group - an ad hoc team of academics and industry experts who studied development projects in five companies over four years - this volume offers a variety of perspectives useful to technical, functional, and general managers alike.
The Product Development Challenge describes successful business practices in organizations that include Chaparral Steel, Eastman-Kodak, Ford Motor, Hewlett-Packard, Honda, and Silicon Graphics, Inc., addresses organizational challenges; and provides frameworks for managing the processes, innovations, and R&D efforts that will lead to the winning product development projects of tomorrow - not just in high technology companies, but in any manufacturing environment.