Lean product development

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Product development (PD) consists of the set of activities required to convert an idea into a marketable product. In an increasingly complex, dynamic environment, rapid turnaround of high quality new products has become an imperative. This is certainly the case in Canada, where changing customer preferences and decreasing time to market windows are the main drivers for investing in PD. In 2008, Canada invested $36.8 billion dollars in PD in the manufacturing sector, and an average of 16% of revenues came from new products, compared to 30% in the US. PD is clearly a critical competitive lever for consumer-driven firms. Decades of research in PD have produced a plethora of tools, techniques, and best practices and firms have had countless opportunities to learn from their failures and successes in PD. Why then does consistent PD success continue to be an elusive goal? For one, PD is very complex and resource-consuming. Add to this changing customer preferences, local and global competition, regulatory changes, technological advances, and organizational constraints, and it is evident that successfully producing a steady stream of innovative products will always remain a challenge. An average of 1/7 products succeed and 44% of projects do not meet their profitability goals; these statistics show that resources invested in PD result in a huge amount of waste. To deal with this, the principles of lean manufacturing have recently been applied with success to non-manufacturing areas. The lean philosophy advocates a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement by following the product at the pull of the customer, in pursuit of perfection. To date, little research has been done to determine how to translate lean manufacturing principles to PD. The overarching goal of this research is to develop tools and techniques for successful and sustainable PD using lean principles. The PD system is organized in terms of its basic elements: a) people, b) process, and c) tools and technology. Successful PD highly depends on the effective design, integration and coordination of these three interrelated elements. A fourth element, d) performance measurement, is necessary to ensure that lean is working.