The Handbook of Technology and Innovation Management

4.5. Concluding Remarks: Past Research and Future Directions

We started this chapter by introducing the problem-solving framework and its usefulness in tying together the various academic disciplines that have contributed to an improved understanding of product development. The academic discipline of product development has experienced a period of dramatic growth and scholarly activity bringing together work in Marketing, Organizational Theory, Engineering, and Operations Management. The review by Krishnan and Ulrich (2001) lists more than 200 references, almost all of them published in top academic journals. If one includes the numerous articles published in other journals and adds the literature from journals such as R&D Management, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, all of which are high-quality journals almost entirely dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in product development, we are likely to have a stock of articles well in excess of 1000.

This dramatic growth of the product development literature has substantially changed the nature of research published today. Consider, as a case in point, the literature on overlapping development activities in the attempt to compress the overall schedule (parallel task execution) and to improve the information flows among various parties involved in the project. The first discussion of this concept appeared in Imai et al. (1985), ...