"U", "V" & "W"

Question 1

Uncertainty Range

Answer 1

The spread between the high (best case) and low (worst case) values in a business assumption

Question 2

User

Answer 2

Any person who uses a product or service to solve a problem or obtain a benefit, whether or not they purchase it. Users may consume a product, as in the case of a person using shampoo to clean their hair or eating a potato chip to assuage hunger between meals. Users may not directly consume a product, but may interact with it over a longer period of time, like a family owning a car, with multiple family members using it for many purposes over a number of years. Products also are employed in the production of other products or services, where the users may be the manufacturing personnel who operate the equipment.

Question 3

Utilities

Answer 3

The weights derived from conjoint analysis that measure how much a product feature contributes to purchase interest or preference.

Question 4

Value

Answer 4

Any principle to which a person or company adheres with some degree of emotion. It is one of the elements that enter into formulating a strategy.

Question 5

Value-added

Answer 5

The act or process by which tangible product features or intangible service attributes are bundled, combined or packaged with other features and attributes to create a competitive advantage, reposition a product or increase sales.

Question 6

Value Analysis

Answer 6

A technique for analyzing systems and designs. Its purpose is to help develop a design that satisfies users by providing the needed user requirements in sufficient quality at an optimum (minimum) cost.

Question 7

Value Chain

Answer 7

As a product moves from raw material to finished good delivered to the customer, value is added at each step in the manufacturing and delivery process. The value chain indicates the relative amount of value added at each of these steps.

Question 8

Value Proposition

Answer 8

A short, clear, and simple statement of how and on what dimensions a product concept will deliver value to prospective customers. The essence of “value” is embedded in the tradeoff between the benefits a customer receives from a new product and the price a customer pays for it. (see Chapter 3 of the PDMA ToolBook 1).

Question 9

Vertical Integration

Answer 9

A firmís operation across multiple levels of the value chain. In the early 1900ís, Ford Motor Company was extremely vertically integrated, as it owned forests and operated logging and wood finishing and glass-making businesses. They made all of the components that went into automobiles, as well as most of the raw materials used in those components.

Question 10

Virtual Customer

Answer 10

A set of web-based market research methods for gathering voice-of-the-customer data in all phases of product development (See Dahan and Hauser, JPIM, July 2002).

Question 11

Virtual Product Development

Answer 11

Paperless product development. All design and analysis is computer-based.

Question 12

Virtual Reality

Answer 12

Technology that enables a designer or user to “enter” and navigate a computer-generated 3-D environment. Users can change their viewpoint and interact with the objects in the scene in a way that simulates real-world experiences.

Question 13

Virtual Team

Answer 13

Dispersed teams that communicate and work primarily electronically may be called virtual teams.

Question 14

Vision

Answer 14

An act of imagining, guided by both foresight and informed discernment, that reveals the possibilities as well as the practical limits in new product development. It depicts the most desirable, future state of a product or organization.

Question 15

Visionary Companies

Answer 15

Leading innovators in their industries, they rank first or second in market share, profitability, growth, and shareholder performance. A substantial portion (e.g., 30% or more) of their sales are from products introduced in the last three years. Many firms want to benchmark these firms.

Question 16

Visions

Answer 16

The new product development practitioner-oriented magazine of the PDMA.

Question 17

Voice of the Customer (VOC)

Answer 17

A process for eliciting needs from consumers that uses structured in-depth interviews to lead interviewees through a series of situations in which they have experienced and found solutions to the set of problems being investigated. Needs are obtained through indirect questioning by coming to understand how the consumers found ways to meet their needs, and, more important, why they chose the particular solutions they found. (See Chapter 11 of The PDMA ToolBook 1.)

Question 18

Waste

Answer 18

Any activity that utilizes equipment, materials, parts, space, employee time, or other corporate resource beyond minimum amount required for value-added operations to ensure manufacturability. These activities could include waiting, accumulating semi-processed parts, reloading, passing materials from one hand to the other, and other nonproductive processes. The seven basic categories of waste that a business should strive to eliminate: overproduction, waiting for machines, transportation time, process time, excess inventory, excess motion, and defects.

Question 19

Whole Product

Answer 19

A product definition concept that emphasizes delivering all aspects of a product which are required for it to deliver its full value. This would include training materials, support systems, cables, how to recipes, additional hardware/software, standards and procedures, implementation, applications consulting - any constitutive elements necessary to assure the customer will have a successful experience and achieve at least minimum required value from the product. Often elements of the whole product are provided via alliances with others. This term is most often used in the context of planning high technology products.

Question 20

Workflow Design Team

Answer 20

Functional contributors who work together to create and execute the work-flow component of a Stage-Gate™ system. They decide how the firm’s Stage-Gate™ process will be structured, what tasks it will include, what decision points will be include d and who is involved at all points.

Question 21

Workplan

Answer 21

Detailed plan for executing the project, identifying each phase of the project, the major steps associated with them, and the specific tasks to be performed along the way. Best practice workplans identify the specific functional resources assigned to each task, the planned task duration, and the dependencies between tasks. See also, “Gantt chart.”

Question 22

Worth What Paid For (WWPF)

Answer 22

The quantitative evaluation by a person in your customer segment of the question: “Considering the products and services that your vendor offers, are they worth what you paid for them?”

Question 23

Value Statement

Answer 23

States the code of conduct, the posture, and behavior expected of the people involved in fulfilling the mission

Question 24

Venture Team

Answer 24

Used for radical new technology innovations where new market development is also required