TRAINING SME’S FOR NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT

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TRAINING SME’S FOR NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENTMANAGEMENT

N. Bialis (1), A. Antoniadis (2), K. A. Jones (3) and C. Hall (4)(1) Associate Professor, Dept. of Production Enginnering and management,Technical University of Crete, Greece. bilalis@dpem@tuc.gr(2) Professor, Tecnological Educational Institute of Crete,Department of Mechanical Engineering, Greece. antoniadis@chania.teiher.gr(3) Managing Director, KAJ ISIS Ltd, Bedworth (UK). keith@kaj-isis.com(4) Managing Director, Chalice Projects Ltd (UK). carolyn@chalice-projects.com

ABSTRACTNew products are the focal point of competition and the lifeblood of successful companies.Developing high quality products more efficiently and effectively tops the competitive agenda forsenior managers around the world. The rapid evolution of marketable technologies - a key source ofcompetitiveness - is entirely dependent on a company’s ability to effectively manage its productdevelopments. SME’s are rather slow in adopting practices arising from large companies experiences.A toolkit (the PROMISE toolkit), suitable for SME’s has been developed. It contains a series of inter-linked tools, which focus on practical and supported ways of creating and customising a phased andcontrolled process that matches an individual SME’s needs to optimise the management of theirproduct developments. The training support materials that are included as an integral element of thetoolkit fall into two areas. Those that are directly concerned with assessing, designing, implementingand refining your customised GateWay process and a range of basic support skills, which are the coreskills necessary to optimise usage of the PROMISE process - all with a practical bias towards productdevelopment issues. Finally the toolkit is supplement this with material adapted from support trainingto assist the front-end tasks related to the creativity needs of product development ie. generatingcreative product concepts ideas and analysis of such concepts in respect of risk and “fit” with thecompany’s business strategy

KEYWORDS. New Product Development, Product Process Innovation, GateWay.1.INTRODUCTIONNew products are the focal point of competition and the lifeblood of successful companies.Developing high quality products more efficiently and effectively tops the competitive agenda forsenior managers around the world. The rapid evolution of marketable technologies - a key source ofcompetitiveness - is entirely dependent on a company’s ability to effectively manage its productdevelopments. Shorter lines of communication and relatively informal decision making can givesmaller companies an advantage over large corporations, meaning that product innovation is one areain which smaller companies can potentially outperform larger competitors.

There is certainly no shortage of product ideas and concepts flowing within SMEs. However, in alarge number of cases, there exists an inability to bring successful innovations to the marketplace in acontrolled and coordinated way. Vision and drive are not enough for successful on-going productdevelopments. A large number of studies over the past decade have indicated that SMEs frequentlysuffer in the management of their product innovation process through a lack of structure. Constantlysuccessful innovation requires discipline, good teamwork and the careful assessment of progress ateach phase.

A number of studies have indicated the urgent need to improve the competitiveness of Europeancompanies, and particularly SMEs, through improved product development. These results were alsoreinforced by findings from the market research survey undertaken within the scope of a number ofEEC supported projects. All the marker research indicates that SMEs are ripe for support. A survey ofSME’s across 5 Member States indicated similar results[3]:

• Only 17.5% of the sample could define their formal procedures for managing and controllingrisk of potential new products,

• Only 22.5% could define any formal product innovation procedures in-house.• 50% were totally dissatisfied with their current procedures for managing productdevelopments and a further 35% were looking to improve same• Only 17.5% had undertaken and/or implemented strategic training to support or improve theirproduct innovation process.

However virtually all actions to date have focused on improving the product innovation process inlarger companies where the resulting outputs are rarely directly transferable into SMEs, who require amore flexible less bureaucratic approach [5]. By looking at these good practices we have then adaptedthem specifically for SME usage and tested on a range of SME end-users.