When Intel announces yet another breakthrough in chip technology, the triumph is as much a testimony to the rapid advances of modern development tools as it is to the skills of the research and development team. Indeed, the exponential performance gains of integrated circuits have fueled dramatic advances in computer simulation and tools for today’s design teams. This progress has now come full circle: Today’s complex chips would be impossible to design and manufacture without the tools that they helped to create. Not surprisingly, companies in many fields have invested billions of dollars, expecting that these innovation tools will lead to huge leaps in performance, reduce costs and somehow foster innovation.
But tools, no matter how advanced, do not automatically confer such benefits. In the excitement of imagining how much improvement is possible, companies can easily forget that these artifacts don’t create products and services all by themselves. People, processes and tools are jointly responsible for innovation and development. In fact, when incorrectly integrated into an organization (or not integrated at all), new tools can actually inhibit performance, increase costs and cause innovation to founder.1 In a nutshell, tools are only as effective as the people and organizations using them.
Embedded Tools
Many new products or services depend on innovations in development tools. My research has found that new tools can significantly increase developers’... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article in PDF form.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this article and the entire archive of MIT SMR articles.
Upgrade your existing subscription to premium
Sign in if you are a premium subscriber.
Do you subscribe the MIT Sloan Management Review in print? Enter the email address and password you used when ordering. Don't remember? Lookup your subscription account information
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription give you access to the entire archive of articles.
