The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

Part II: ORGANIZING THE DEVELOPMENT

A bad beginning makes a bad ending.

—EURIPIDES, CREEK PLAYWRIGHT, 438 BC

Companies develop innovative new products in three broad categories: incremental, platform, and breakthrough. New arrangements, described in Chapter 8, separate mainstream incremental development from the other two. However, this separation is not so distant that what emerges from platform and breakthrough development becomes irrelevant to the mainstream.

Teamwork is not a new idea but now, more than ever before, product development practitioners must pay attention to effective teamwork. The skills outlined in Chapter 9 move beyond threshold competencies to skills for building fast and flexible teams. Such teams can work dynamically and creatively toward objectives in a changing environment.

Getting approval for product development actions is not just a rational exercise of telling others that a project is important. Rather, it is a means of creating support. Chapter 10 helps practitioners cope with political behavior at the company and department levels by focusing on their interaction with other practitioners, with the departments with whom they must work, and with management.

Given a clean sheet of paper, how would you design a new product development process that brings to together the following qualities? The process brings to bear the best talent you need for success. It has costs that are competitive globally. And, finally, it offers enough edge to change the game ...