Analysis

Based on what was discussed in our vision, the BPD group sees its main research challenge as both analyzing existing NPD processes and designing and creating new NPD processes through two main lines of research:

• New Product Development Processes for Intelligent Systems, Products and related Services

• New Product Development by Open Innovation Networks for Intelligent Systems

The New Product Development Process (NPD) consists of three main phases that take place at two levels of activity, see also Figure 1.

• Discovery Phase: covers the entire process of searching for and identifying opportunities - whether market-based or technology-based – and all of the planning and strategy to accomplish this. It requires the identification of customer needs, problems and benefits, and the conceptual features that are envisioned for the products to be built. It ends with the publication of a formal product specifications document.

• Development Phase: covers the realization process of converting specifications into designs whether for an individual product or a complete portfolio of products – and all of the processes to accomplish this. It usually requires detailed resource management, creative engineering and process design capabilities and sophisticated information technology. It ends when the products or services achieve their first commercial availability.

• Commercialization Phase: covers the entire process of new product introduction and the organization’s management of its product and service portfolio as it attempts to fulfill its financial potential. It ends when the products or services have reached the end of their useful lifecycle and are to be considered as candidates for retirement, renewal and regeneration. At this stage, the process begins anew with the undertaking of a new product development initiative.

NPD activities take place at either of two different levels within the company:

• Business/portfolio level: covers anything that does not directly relate to the development of an individual project/product. The business/portfolio level of product development is relevant in all three development phases. Concepts and tools to help managers to manage their business/portfolio development activities include portfolio strategy and management, pipeline management, platform planning, risk management, market trend analysis, technology strategy, co-development strategy, IP management and licensing, the front-end innovation process and appropriate metrics among others.

• Project/Product Level: covers the firm’s product development activities that are concerned with managing an individual development project to a successful conclusion. The project/product level is relevant in all three development phases. Concepts and tools that can be used to help the managers who do the actual work on a specific project to develop a particular new product include project planning, sales forecasting, product innovation charters, gated processes, front-end homework, marketing plan development and the many useful tools of market research such as voice of the customer, site visits, concept testing, product testing and market testing.

The focus of the research of the BPD group will be on the business aspects at project/product level, in all three main phases. To be able to connect to the more strategic focus that is related to the business/portfolio level of activities, joint research projects will be carried out with other research groups such as the Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences Department).

Perspectives

For the research a successful conclusion of an NPD project is defined as an intelligent system that is able to generate sustainable benefits for the parties involved. This includes a financial profit for the companies involved, but also includes well-being, aspects of sustainability for society, as well as the environment (‘People, Planet & Profit’). The focus of the research is on solving problems that have their roots in important societal problems or issues, by combining two important aspects:

• It should be based on a solid end-user insight or need, and a deep understanding of what is important and what moves them – ‘the need’.

• It provides a creative, out-of-the-box, intelligent solution based on a combination of products and services that together provide true added value for the end-users – ‘the solution’.

Value innovation based on achieving a good match between the need and the solution is considered a crucial success factor for the adoption of innovations, and therefore also for the success of the business.

As described earlier the design of intelligent systems is faced with specific challenges in both identifying the needs and providing solutions. These can be translated into two main research challenges:

• Adaptability of the system and the users
• Innovation in flexible networks

The BPD group sees its main research challenge as analyzing existing NPD processes and designing and creating new NPD processes through two main lines of research:

• New Product Development Processes for Intelligent Systems, Products and related Services

• New Product Development by Open Innovation Networks for Intelligent Systems

Sub-program New Product Development Processes for Intelligent Systems, Product and related Services

The starting point for this sub-program is one or more companies that want to develop intelligent systems, products or services. As described earlier, an important challenge in creating intelligent systems, products and related services is the fact that these systems have a strong capability to adapt to individual users. Also users may adapt themselves to these systems. Recent examples are products like personal computers, PDAs and cellphones, in which each individual user will, to a certain extent, gradually develop a combination of individualized hardware, strongly individualized software and even more individualized user profiles. This is expected to increase even further in the near future due to the growing degree of intelligence in new systems in this field, which allows an increasing degree of personalization. An increased variety of users, use cases and use situations is the result, which creates a fundamental problem from a business perspective since the traditional, uniform set of consumer needs for target markets no longer exists. Instead, a wide variety of often very different instances of user-product interaction form the commercial arena for which a product should be designed.

This requires on the one hand explorative strategies to identify and characterize the variability of product-user interactions very quickly in the discovery phase, in which probes/concepts of products are very rapidly developed and exposed to the intended target groups. The response of these target groups and their interactions with the product concepts are also analyzed very rapidly and in detail. On the other hand, methods are needed to enable designers/integrators to handle the variability in the design of intelligent systems during the development phase. At the same time efficient testing strategies and methods are needed to ensure high product quality and customer satisfaction within the required time-to-market. In the commercialization phase the challenge lies in the collection of field feedback from the wide variety of user-product interactions and the translation of the resulting rich datasets into information suited for improvement or adjustment of the value proposition for new concepts.

As a consequence, the research in this sub-program concentrates on:

• Designing New Product Development methods that support the integrator/designer in efficiently designing and testing intelligent systems, taking into account the variety of users, use situations and context
• Design of a New Product Development process describing the elements required for the discovery phase, development phase and commercialization phase for intelligent (i.e. adaptive) systems

Sub-program New Product Development by open innovation networks for Intelligent Systems

The starting point for this sub-program is a societal issue that needs a breakthrough solution to be solved in terms of an intelligent system, product and services. In many cases such problems (e.g. rising medical expenses due to the aging population) can only be really solved by generating creative, out-of-the-box solutions that require the involvement of various stakeholders to really succeed. The networks of parties needed to generate the ideas, develop them into feasible solutions and commercialize them successfully are often formed on an ad hoc basis during a new product development project (and are not necessarily the result of strategic decisions and careful establishment of partnerships). Specifically for intelligent systems, such networks will most probably change over time as parties can leave and join at each stage in the NPD process due to changing insights and product-user adjustments over time. True value innovations are based on intelligent solutions combining ideas generated in open settings, in which the participants openly share information and unfinished ideas, with high levels of uncertainty about the possible benefits and which product-user interactions will succeed.

In many cases breakthrough solutions using intelligent systems require new value systems, which have to be designed as well as the intelligent product and services themselves). The value system must ensure an attractive business case for all parties involved, but at the same time these parties may need to accept changes in their traditional business models. The challenges lie not just in the discovery phase, in which the challenge is to generate ideas with multiple parties, but also in the further development of the ideas into feasible, market-ready systems, products and services. The cross-company teams will need to manage conflicts, negotiate resources and solve technical and IP problems, while decision-making is inherently more complex due to the openness of the system. Because of the adaptive capability of the intelligent system and the user, these open networks are subject to modifications over time, and therefore need to be flexible to cope with these dynamics. Even though a good value system may have been defined in the discovery phase, it cannot be assumed that the identified benefits will stay the same for all involved parties, with new insights and adjusted product-user interaction behavior as the project progresses. Moreover, as insights change some parties will probably step out of the network while others may want to join. Continuous tuning of the value systems and the business cases of the parties involved is therefore required for open innovation of intelligent systems, products and services.

As a consequence, the research under this sub-program concentrates on:

• Designing New Product Development methods to develop value systems and business models for open innovation networks of intelligent systems, products and services, that ensure sustainable benefits for all stakeholders
• Definition of a framework for New Product Development by open innovation networks of intelligent systems, products and services, containing requirements for the discovery phase, development phase and commercialization phase