MIT Sloan Management Review

With complex products such as automobiles, integration is a key element of performance. That means managers must understand which activities and competencies they can safely outsource and which they need to keep.

We're pleased to report that FOLIO: has honored MIT Sloan Management Review with a 2009 Ozzie Award for the recent redesign of our publication.

Best practice in product development (PD) is migrating from local collaboration to global collaboration. Global product development (GPD) represents a transformation for business, and it applies to a range of industries. The objective of this article is to present frameworks that can help companies address strategic and tactical issues when considering GPD. The concepts have been developed through discussions with more than 100 companies in 15 countries in North America, Europe and Asia.

Mick McManus, CEO of a company called MAYA Design, offers some interesting reflections on the state of product innovation during the current downturn.

Innovating  in difficult economic times can be discouraging. With that in mind, here's an upbeat video clip from Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, the well-known design firm. Kelley spoke at Stanford a few months ago on the topic of "how to be an innovator for life."

A focus on design —which translates to a focus on customers’ true needs and unarticulated aspirations — ultimately creates better-informed, more nimble companies.

During the 1980s, Benetton was known as the archetypal network organization. But it decided to take a new direction representing a major discontinuity with its past and a divergence from industry practices. Without giving up the strongest aspects of its networked model, it integrated and centralized, exerting greater control over its supply chain even as it diversified its operations and product lines. The authors offer a detailed case study of this dramatic transformation.

How Toyota’s product design and development process helps find the best solutions and develop successful products.

After calculating the risks of introducing a new product, companies must choose a primary strategy, monitor market conditions, and adopt a contingency strategy if necessary.

Scholars and observers from disciplines as disparate as sociology, economics, and management science agree that a transformation has occurred — knowledge is at center stage.1 Knowledge is information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection.

Microsoft’s approach to software product development allows teams to be creative and retain the autonomy of small groups by frequently synchronizing and stabilizing continuous design changes.

How can a company successfully attack an established market leader? How can it find new ways to compete that everyone else has missed? By breaking the rules of the game in its industry to find new sources of innovation, says this author. In a study of thirty successful attackers, he identified five ways that they think about and develop a new game plan.

The failure to integrate a product strategy, a well-planned portfolio, and a facilitating organization structure with clearly identified customer needs, a well-defined product concept, and a project plan can severely hamper new product development. An examination of eleven companies aims at improving the effectiveness of the front-end process.

A firm decided to redesign its research and development process. Because the effort was critical to its success, the firm applied two parallel approaches to the process. One was a classical reengineering effort in which a small group of managers and consultants designed a radically different way to do research.

“This is not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [i.e., the Bell operating companies] here. Rather, it is a market of a thousand niches served by tens of thousands of firms, each offering dozens, if not hundreds, of different products.&

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We can apply this Newtonian principle to the vertical supply chain: for every part outsourced by an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), there is an equal and opposite opportunity for a parts supplier to furnish that part.

What can the plant manager at a Japanese soy sauce producer teach us about reengineering? In this case study, the authors describe Toshio Okuno’s five techniques for managing major changes in his company. By focusing first on changing people’s attitudes toward change and encouraging them to be creative, Okuno brought about significant improvements in processes and results. And the managers and workers, rather than reengineering consultants, began to propose ideas for change. Okuno’s techniques work as an integrated system that allow his company to innovate continuously and present many lessons for making change fun.

Major business reengineering efforts represent an organization’s commitment of millions of dollars for redesigning internal organizational processes, changing fundamental product delivery and customer service procedures, and often reexamining and repositioning corporate strategy.