TIM Lecture 7

Question 1

The Stage-Gate-Process by Cooper

Answer 1

Stage 0: Discovery
Gate 1: Idea Screen
Stage 1: Scoping
Gate 2: Second screen
Stage 2: Build Business case
Gate 3: Go to development
Stage 3: Development
Gate 4: Go to testing
Stage 4: Testing and validation
Gate 5: Go to Launch
Stage 5: Launch
Stage 6: Post-launch review
Stages and gates break the innovation process into defined stages, each consisting of a set of defined, parallel and cross-functional activities

Question 2

Pros and cons of stage-gate-process

Answer 2

Good: popular, widely-used tool that clearly sharpens decision-making on many level (project, portfolio, etc.)

Bad:
– R&D is often political, the process can be “hijacked”
– Choice of criteria determines throughput, requires hard work
– More haste, less speed: goal should always be successful product introduction
– Tyranny of the process: the process should not become an end to itself (use the process as a guideline, rather than a “rule book”)
– Incremental improvements or routine developments likely need a different stage-gate process than radical innovation
– The right incentives are critical: the reward systems need to support the behavior needed to make the process work

Question 3

Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Answer 3

– is a systematic method to link customers‘ quality requirements to technical product features
– aims a developing products and services that fulfill customers‘ needs
– uses tables and graphs for that purpose
– concerns both internal and external interfaces of the company
– extends responsibility for product quality to all departments of the company

Question 4

QFD: Steps

Answer 4

Step 1: Customer attributes and bundles of CAs
Step 2: Determine the relative-importance weights
Step 3: Customers’ evaluation of competitive products
Step 4: Technical realization of customer attributes
– How can desired product features / changes be realized?Customer: “what?” vs. Engineer: “how?”
• Top of the House of Quality:
Engineering Characteristics (ECs) that affect CAs
• Dimensions of measurement need to be determined
• Helpful: use of creativity and moderation techniques

Step 5: Relationship matrix shows how engineering decisions affect customer perceptions
Step 6: Objective measures to evaluate competitive products
Step 7: Roof matrix to show interactions between ECs
Step 8: Estimates of cost and technical difficulty complete the HoQ

Question 5

Likely failures in the PSI process

Answer 5

• Do not meet user needs
• Not sufficiently differentiated from products of competitors
• Do not meet technical specifications
• Too highly priced for perceived value
• Too late to market

Question 6

How do you measure performance in PSI?

Answer 6

Productivity
– Resources committed against new products over time

Speed to market
– The time taken between the start of a project and its commercialization

Flexibility
– Elapsed time between concept freeze and market introduction

Quality
– The degree of fit between the PSI quality function and the actual quality
achieved

Overall fit
– The relationship between the PSI outcome with the goals in the strategy and feedback from the market

Question 7

Wrap-Up

Answer 7

Innovative activity organized, visualized, and understood usually as a funnel
– What goes into the funnel, where this knowledge comes from, and how it
is evaluated comes from innovation strategy
– Success and failure also need to be seen in relation to the strategy
– Selecting out of projects is different from failure

Stage-gate process as a way to “operationalize” the funnel

Open Innovation: the funnel is permeable

Quality function deployment as another tool
– Foreshadows even more strongly the important issue of interfaces which we will elaborate over the next sessions