"B" Flashcards
Back-up
A project that moves forward, either in synchrony or with a moderate time-lag, and for the same marketplace, as the lead project to provide an alternative asset should the lead project fail in development. A back-up has essentially the same mechanism of action performance as the lead project. Normally a company would not advance both the lead and the back-up project through to the market place, since they would compete directly with each other.
Balanced Scorecard
A comprehensive performance measurement technique that balances four performance dimensions: 1. Customer perceptions of how we are performing; 2. Internal perceptions of how we are doing at what we must excel at; 3. Innovation and learning performance; 4. Financial performance.
Baton-Passing Process
See Relay-Race Process
Benchmarking
A process of collecting process performance data, generally in a confidential, blinded fashion, from a number of organizations to allow them to assess their performance individually and as a whole.
Benefit
A product attribute expressed in terms of what the user gets from the product rather than its physical characteristics or features. Benefits are often paired with specific features, but they need not be.
Best Practice
Methods, tools or techniques that are associated with improved performance. In new product development, no one tool or technique assures success; however a number of them are associated with higher probabilities of achieving success. Best practices likely are at least somewhat context specific. Sometimes called “effective practice.”
Best Practice Study
A process of studying successful organizations and selecting the best of their actions or processes for emulation. In new product development it means finding the best process practices, adapting them and adopting them for internal use. (See Chapter 36 in the PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition, Chapter 33 in The PDMA HandBook, Griffin, “PDMA Research on New Product Development Practices: Updating Trends and Benchmarking Best Practices,” JPIM, 14:6, 429-458, November, 1997, and “Drivers of NPD Success: The 1997 PDMA Report,” PDMA, October, 1997)
Beta Test
An external test of pre-production products. The purpose is to test the product for all functions in a breadth of field situations to find those system faults that are more likely to show in actual use than in the firm’s more controlled in-house tests before sale to the general market. See also field test
Beta Testing
A more extensive test than the Alpha, performed by real users and customers. The purpose of Beta testing is to determine how the product performs in an actual user environment. It is critical that real customers perform this evaluation, not the firm developing the product or a contracted testing company. As with the Alpha test, results of the Beta Test should be carefully evaluated with an eye toward any needed modifications or corrections.
Bill of Materials (BOM)
A listing of all subassemblies, intermediate parts, and raw materials that go into a parent assembly, showing the quantity of each required to make an assembly.
Bowling Alley
An early growth stage strategy which emphasizes focusing on specific niche markets, building a strong position in those markets by delivering clearly differentiated “whole products” and using that niche market strength as leverage point for conquering conceptually neighboring niche markets. Success in the Bowling alley is predicated on building product leadership via customer intimacy.
Brainstorming
A group method of creative problem-solving frequently used in product concept generation. There are many modifications in format, each variation with its own name. The basis of all of these methods uses a group of people to creatively generate a list of ideas related to a particular topic. As many ideas as possible are listed before any critical evaluation is performed. (See Chapters 16 and 17 in The PDMA HandBook 2nd Edition.)
Brand
A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller.
Brand Development Index (BDI)
A measure of the relative strength of a brand’s sales in a geographic area. Computationally, BDI is the percent of total national brand sales that occur in an area divided by the percent of U.S. households that reside in that area.
Breadboard
A proof-of-concept modeling technique that represents how a product will work, but not how a product will look
