By Paul Wright, J.D.

In this article, Paul Wright, a lawyer and a contributor to FastTrack, explains why it is important for Legal Departments to work much more closely with the R&D function than they ever have before. Wright explains that the trend toward Open Innovation means that intellectual property, in the form of patents, trade secrets and trademarks, is a major portion of the value produced by R&D. This means that asset management is an emerging, core capability for collaborative product development. In this piece, Wright argues for creating closer links between R&D and Legal functions by staffing lawyers on the development teams – or at least getting them into the research loop earlier in the process. He also suggests some ways to formalize the interface between Legal and R&D.
(5 pages)

Product innovation and the processes that support it have been the focus for Jerry McColgin’s work for 20 years.  He currently serves as President for Innovation Services at Venture2, which assists businesses in identifying new sources of revenue through the creation of new products and services.  From 1997 until 2004, he was principal of McColgin Consulting.  He previously spent 15 years with Whirlpool Corporation, ultimately serving as that company’s Director of Global New Product Development.  Management Roundtable recently spoke with McColgin on the subject of global markets as one facet of global product development.

In this MRT interview, Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, speaks about how cognitive and emotional aspects of product design influence buying decisions.  Norman explains how ‘design’ involves the customer’s total experience of a product and distinguishes three levels of design: visceral, behavioural and reflective.  He also outlines the role that each level of design plays at different stages of the product lifecycle including the differing design requirements of early adopters as compared with ordinary users. 

A cognitive scientist, Don serves as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University.  He is also co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm.  Among his many non-academic activities, Norman was previously Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer. 

The medical products industry, where firms tend to compete on technology alone, provides an excellent case for how design may be used to create competitive advantage.  In this report, Allan Cameron of Design Continuum explains why design has become a key to product differentiation and how his firm worked with medical products firm Affymetrix to create designs which helped their products stand out from the competition.  Affymetrix’s Steve Kellett describes how product and user research enabled the company to create a design language, a lexicon representing the image it wanted its product to convey.  It included such attributes as empowering, approachable, precise, trustworthy, and brilliant.  The design language offered cues for determining the product’s physical design and a general framework for understanding the design features that would best embody the attributes the company had decided mattered most.  Cameron and Kellett make a case for design for differentiation, and show how such an approach may be applied.

In this report, Nicholas Svensson, a Leader in Nortel Networks’ CDMA Manufacturing Services, assigned to that company’s New Product Introduction unit, discusses his firm’s experience regarding the effects of part commonality on product development lead-time.  Earlier in this decade, Nortel tested a strategy of part commonality as a means for attaining product convergence as well as for accelerating time-to-market.  Confining his inquiry to the product development process supporting the hardware for the company’s base transceiver stations, he examined the impact of part commonality, over a three-year period, on four types of product part design, beginning with the most basic and ascending through increased levels of product complexity and integration.  He found that product lead-times lengthened as the level of integration increased, suggesting that a thoroughgoing insistence on part commonality could impede product development processes.

In this report, Laura Élan, Program Director for Personal Audio at Shure, Inc. shares her insights into how and why the audio electronics company uses external design partners to speed new products to market.  She describes how the firm selects partners and how these partnerships have influenced Shure’s internal processes.  Wayne Mackey, a principal at Product Development Consulting, Inc., also presents an overview of design partnerships as a means of decreasing cycle time.  Mackey discusses, in particular, how these alliances impact systems engineering, purchasing functions and program management. 

Click here to download the complete report (6 pages).

In this December 2005 MRT audio session, Tim Jones of Innovaro and Tony Ulwick of Strategyn presented proven approaches for measuring innovation.  They explained why it is necessary to measure the outcomes that customers use to measure success.  They suggest that it is best to balance measures of the business results (such as market share growth) with measures of internal activities (such as number of patents filed).  The panelists also presented approaches for measuring open innovation; for selecting concepts and measuring the value of Intellectual Property; and for measuring the value of an innovation portfolio.