A Coordination Mechanism for Lean Product Development

摘要

Lean product development (LPD) encourages overlapping of activities to accelerate processes but also suggests a combination of iterative and parallel processing of activities for delivering value. This latter suggestion, however, might increase the complexity of new product development (NPD) processes, making them more difficult to manage. Consequently, companies continue to struggle to implement LPD. It appears that successful LPD implementation requires tight coordination among interdependent activities. This paper proposes an appropriate coordination mechanism for NPD processes with the aim of supporting and promoting successful LPD implementations. This paper is intended to help practitioners and researchers interested in LPD.