Managing Product Definition in High-Technology Industries: A Pilot Study

Gupta A.K. Wilemon D.L. , “Accelerating the Development of Technology-Based New Products,” California Management Review, 32/2 (Winter 1990): 24–44; Clark K.B. Hayes R. Wheelwright S.C. , Dynamic Manufacturing (New York. NY: Free Press. 1989); Clark K. B. Fujimoto T. , Product Development Performance: Strategy, Organization, and Management in the World Auto Industry (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1991); Rosenthal S.R. , Effective Product Design and Development: How to Cut Lead Time and Increase Customer Satisfaction (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1992); Wheelwright S.C. Clark K.B. , Revolutionizing Product Development: Quantum Leaps in Speed, Efficiency, and Quality (New York, NY: Free Press, 1992).

Gupta Wilemon , op. cit.

Eisenhardt K. , “Speed and Strategic Choice: How Managers Accelerate Decision Making,” California Management Review, 32/3 (Spring 1990): 39–54.

Gomory R.E. , “From the ‘Ladder of Science’ to the Product Development Cycle,” Harvard Business Review (November/December 1989).

Womack J. P. Jones D. T. Roos D. , The Machine that Changed the World (New York, NY: Rawson Associates, 1990).

Clark Fujimoto , op. cit.; Clark Hayes Wheelwright , op. cit.

Science Policy Research Unit, Success and Failure in Industrial Innovation (London: Center for the Study of Industrial Innovation, 1972); Freeman C. [The Economics of Industrial Innovation, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982)| summarizes SAPPHO's findings.

Wilson E. , “Product Definition Factors for Successful Designs,” unpublished thesis. Department of Mechanical Engineering. Stanford University, 1990.

There were two exceptions to this project selection process. One company only provided input for one product, and it was successful. Another company provided input for three products, two successful and one a failure.

Wilson's work was based upon collection of data from over fifty new product development projects at Hewlett-Packard. Half of the projects were successes, the other half failures. From a characterization of the differences between the product definition processes of the successes and the failures, Wilson formed the list of ten factors used as a starting point for this research. Wilson , op. cit.

In general, differences among the product definition processes for individual projects were influenced much more heavily by firm- or project-specific factors (e.g., organizational structure) than by factors specific to the environments in which the teams were working (e.g., size or focus of market). Nevertheless, the assumptions made by firms about their environments sometimes proved important. Three of the projects we examined were military contracts, and the participating firms believed that their “customer” had developed a detailed, stable product definition. In all three cases, however, the projects would have benefited from more interaction between developer and customer early in the product definition process.

Gupta Wilemon , op. cit.; Freeman , op. cit.; Rothwell R. Freeman C. Horley A. Jervis V.I.P. Robertson Z.B. Townsend J. , “SAPPHO Updated: Project SAPPHO Phase II,” Research Policy, 3 (1974): 258–291; Langrish J. , Wealth From Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1972): Maidique M.A. Zirger B.J. , “The New Product Learning Cycle,” Research Policy, 14 (1985). Mowery D.C. Rosenberg N. [“The Influence of Market Demand Upon Innovation: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies,” Research Policy (1979)] survey a portion of this “success and failure” literature.

For further discussion of the importance of leveraging “core competencies” in product development projects, see Bowen H.K. Clark K. Holloway C. Wheelwright S.C. , eds., Vision and Capability: High Performance Product Development in the 1990s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Wilson's 1990 study of product definition suggested that Quality Function Deployment (QFD), while an important tool, was insufficient by itself to improve product development. The quality of the informational inputs into the QFD process and the implementation of the resulting product development steps, rather than the use of QFD alone, determined the effectiveness of QFD in Wilson's sample of projects.

As in the study by Clark and Fujimoto [op. cit.], all of the products that we analyzed are industrial capital goods that have complex “external interfaces” with customers. The character of this interface reflects the complexity of these products, which incorporate many components and typically entail significant advances in component, systems, or software capabilities. As such, these products place great demands on the marketing staff to maintain an effective channel of communication between users and product engineering.

See Tanaka T. , “Target Costing: A Field Study in a Japanese Automaker.” Working Paper, Tokyo Keizai University. 1992.

Mowery Rosenberg , op. cit.

Rosenthal [op. cit.] describes this as a “phases and gates” process, where the “gates” provide formal review points.

Clark and Fujimoto [op. cit.] also emphasize the importance of prototyping in facilitating the transition from development to production of a new product, and found that Japanese auto (inns had significantly shorter prototyping cycles than their European or U.S. competitors. A recent case study of a U.S.-Japanese development project also concluded that prototyping significantly eased language-based and other communications problems between development teams on opposite sides of the Pacific. (“Plus Development Corporation,” 1989).

See also Clark Fujimoto , op. cit.

Attempts to statistically test the influence on project success or failure of the variance among development team members' views on the ten factors proved unsuccessful, probably because of the small number of observations.

See Gomory [op. cit.] for an interesting discussion of the complexities of “technology insertion” into development projects.