Technology & Product Development

The rate of change in technology and product development is increasing and so are the challenges that accompany such efforts. There are higher expectations and more complexities in today’s connected world. The entire life cycle of a technology, from raw materials and global supply chains, to usage, and to recycling/disposal must now be considered in any product concept. The development and market ecosystems, including factors like critical mass, policy support, social considerations, and network effects must also be considered. Competition is stronger than ever, aided by the wealth of information on the Internet, globalization, and new software tools. Unfortunately, most technology commercialization efforts and product development efforts underperform, and only the best are successful in their endeavours. To both thrive in the future, and solve the critical needs of the marketplace, organizations must improve their approaches to technology commercialization and product development.

There are two insights we’d like to share.

Technology and Product Roadmapping

The organizations that are most successful in commercializing technology and developing products have coherent internal technology and product roadmaps that link market, technology, products, and their multi-year action plans. We have found these roadmaps in all of the major industries, and in all technology commercialization types – e.g. whether the technology is a new and disruptive, evolving through continuous improvement, or fusing in additional technologies. A good roadmap aligns all the different teams, allows for optimization of the technology project portfolio, and provides the foundation for partnering, securing budgets, and getting senior management approval.

Model-based Engineering

Model-based engineering is increasing in every domain, and function, from system architecture to production, and for both systems and software. However, most engineers focus their modelling within their discipline, while capability to support integration across disciplines is typically more limited or missing. Models from multiple design teams usually have different ways of modelling common properties across all the models within that team or discipline – the result is multiple truths and subsequent late discovery of problems. Those organizations that are most successful deliberately develop an tool and process integration of systems engineering, software engineering, product data management, verification and validation, discipline models, and review processes.

We provide consulting, organizational capability development, and training in:

Technology and Product Roadmapping

• innovation
• customer and market drivers
• competitive analysis
• competitive strategy development
• partnering strategy
• market definition and analysis
• technology roadmapping
• product roadmapping
• product architecture
• experience curves
• mapping of customer, product, drivers, and targets
• forward cost models
• map to investments
• value propositions
• risk roadmaps
• life-cycle costing
• supply chain analysis
• development strategy and action plans

As an example using the connected, autonomous car:

Product development consulting

• product and platform strategy
• product development process improvement
• global product development processes across multiple regions
• model-based engineering process and tool improvement
• design review process improvement
• systems engineering
• reliability, safety, and maintainability engineering
• systems failure analysis
• supply-chain management
• verification and validation
• product- and system-level risk management
• quality process improvement including Lean Six Sigma
• product launch and post-launch support
• tear-down analysis and lessons learned process improvements