Principal Investigator James Utterback
This project has addressed three major challenges confronting product developing organizations:
The product family issue. The challenge is the creation of successive generations of competitively distinctive products leveraged upon basic product platforms which must themselves be renewed. Product planning processes and metrics are often focused at the individual product level and emphasize schedule reliability rather than the quality of R&D and market outcomes. The multi-entity issue. Decentralizing R& D to the business unit level makes it difficult to develop integrated product platforms, important for addressing large customer solutions or systems. Creating the necessary product platforms requires a multi-entity strategic and technology planning process through which different businesses share skills and derive common design goals. The new business creation issue. Despite impressive technical capabilities and well developed platforms, firms may find themselves facing declining markets. Ad hoc processes for identifying and creating new businesses by leveraging core technological assets are, largely, unsuccessful.
This study mapped twenty product families in eight firms, gathering R&D and market information for specific products, and benchmarking capabilities in each case. Businesses studied were primarily engaged in manufacturing, both assembled products and continuous process manufacturing, although one product family in the software industry was studied.