The Who's Who of New Product Development

摘要

New product launches are critical to the success of a company-and a major challenge. Nothing is easy, and there is no place to hide when things go wrong. Bob Lutz, former vice chairman at General Motors, says a company's conceptual design must have a "wow" factor. In other words, as soon as customers see a new product, they take notice-and this hopefully turns into an immediate sale. To achieve this, the design group must be connected to the customer and know what is going to impress. Note also that it may be easy to get a "wow" once, but getting it again and again over the course of years is immensely more difficult. But exciting design isn't enough. It's necessary to take that design and produce it in quantity and with quality. Here, manufacturing and sourcing team members must be professional, talented, detail-conscious, and innovative. These professionals are responsible for taking ideas, concepts, and high-level designs and breaking them down to parts, tooling, and materials. And because the design and launch process is a parallel effort, it's constantly being tweaked, revised, and sometimes completely overhauled.