Similar Concepts in Product Development
There are several other concepts in Product Development and New Product Development that are very closely related:
- Engineering Design: Design for X
- Time Dimension: Product Life Cycle, Product Life Cycle Engineering, Product Life Cycle Management (that is not the same like the Product Cycle in business studies and Economics, see e.g. Vernon (1966). Primarily, the unit of analysis is here "a product", or more clearly a single item
- Meso-Level Organisation: Concurrent Engineering (American), Simultaneous Engineering (British), and overlapping / parallel Product Development Processes
- Micro-Level Organisation: Cross-functional teams, Inter-disciplinary teams, etc.
Looking at all life stages of a product (Product life cycle (engineering)) is essential for Design for X - Otherwise the "X" would not make any sense. When asking what competencies are required for analysing situations that may occur along the life of a product, it becomes clear that several departmental functions are required. An historical assumption is that New Product Development is conducted in a departmental stage process (that can be traced back to the classical theory of the firm, e.g. Max Weber's bureaucracy or Henri Fayol's administration principles), i.e. New Product Development activities are closely associated with certain department of a company. In the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of Concurrent Engineering gained popularity to overcome dysfunctionalities of departmental stage processes. Concurrent Engineering postulate that several departments have to work closely together for certain New Product Development activities (see Clark and Fujimoto, 1991). The logical consequence was the emergence of the organisational mechanism of Cross-functional teams. For example Filippini et al. (2005) found evidence that overlapping Product Development Processes only accelerate New Product Development projects if these are executed by a cross-functional team, vice versa.
Read more about this topic: Design For X
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