Accelerating Innovation: Improving the Process of Product Development

With intense global competition jeopardizing the existence of even successful companies, managers are desperately seeking new ways to develop products that expand market share. Accelerating Innovation is the next stage in technological innovation and management. The book provides a total product development package for developing, managing, and operating a system of innovation that really works. Managers discover how to cope with the limited life span of today's products; anticipate changing consumer needs and desires; close the gap between new technology and products that apply it; bring leading-edge products to market fast; and enjoy higher returns on investment. 6 x 9.

Accelerating Innovation Improving the Process of Product Development Marvin L. Patterson The time for rehashing America’s lost battles on the world market has passed. Now it’s time to address a critical component of the economic battle plan: the product development process that creates the products that satisfy customer needs. How quickly these weapons of economic war are developed, how competitive they are, how timely they are deployed, and how supportable they are will determine the failure or success of American business in the 1990s. Here is the right book at the right time...a concise blueprint to transform product development from a collection of ad hoc activities into an integrated, smoothly operating process. Written by the Director of Corporate Engineering for Hewlett-Packard, one of the most successfully innovative companies in America today, Accelerating Innovation shows how successful, well-tested concepts from the manufacturing domain can be readily transformed into the needy world of new product innovation. Filled with clear-sighted analysis and practical explanations, this book will help management unleash innovation and creativity in development processes to meet the urgent need for bringing new technology to customers faster and more effectively than the competition. Discover how to cope with the limited life span of today’s products...anticipate changing consumer needs and desires...close the gap between new technology and products that apply it...bring leading-edge products to market fast...eliminate profit-threatening gaps between the "death" of obsolete products and the introduction of new ones...and enjoy higher returns on investment. Accelerating Innovation provides a results-oriented model for transferring to product development the strategies that are moving manufacturers from the old era to the new one. Numerous real-life examples give you powerful insights into the time-based factoring and total quality management principles used so successfully in manufacturing and shows how to implement them in the product development cycle. Key chapters address how to:

• shorten the innovation cycle time, applying the principle that success springs from focusing on the right issues
• manage organization change so that change goes where you want it to go—and quickly
• transfer quality principles used on the assembly line to the process of developing raw information and adding value to it
• reduce innovation time by implementing the cost of quality principle (cost as a function of when an error is detected)
• manage information flow and bottlenecks
• minimize changeover time
• and much, much more

Does your organization really have a handle on new product development? Are goals, objectives, processes, metrics, and controls in place? Are you equipped to create new products rationally and systematically, while continuously reducing innovation cycle times? Accelerating Innovation presents new thinking that will help you answer these questions with a resounding "yes." In product development, doing business the same old way is a formula for disaster. The time to act is long before the livelihood of the product development function is ever threatened. And if a company is trying to catch up, then it has to improve faster than its toughest competition if it ever expects to win. Finally, here is a guide that can give you the critical advantage you need for success in product development—success that is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for survival.