Many manufacturers have established product development activities in different countries around the world. Yet their senior managers often struggle to tie those decentralized organizations into a cohesive, unified operation that can efficiently drive growth and innovation. New empirical frameworks may help unlock practices with which managers can deploy well-coordinated global product development strategies.
Editor’s Note: MIT Sloan Management Review first published “The New Practice of Global Product Development” in our Summer 2006 edition. In the article, authors Steven D. Eppinger and Anil R. Chitkara examined state-of-the-art and emerging best practices in global product development (GPD). GPD continues to evolve, and in 2009, we asked Eppinger, the General Motors Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, to update the article with new insights about GPD. His additions are published here along side the 2006 article, annotating the original text.