Month

Program

February, 12th (date moved due to holidays)

 

KICK OFF EVENT!

The Power of Strategic Vision to Support Product and/or Services Offerings

You're either pushed by your pain or pulled by your vision.

A strategic vision creates a direction and identifies the future destination envisioned by the company. A clear strategic vision provides a corporate focus on opportunities while aligning and channeling the entire organization's efforts. A Strategic Vision supports effective long-range decision making addressing technology direction, product development roadmaps and services offerings.

This month's AeA Product Development program will define the meaning and significance of a strategic vision, who should be involved and how to develop a strategic vision using a step by step process.
 

February 26th

Creating Strategic Offerings to Attack the Market - Aligning Innovation with Strategic Vision

Today, as always, the set of company assets, resources and capital investments change slowly over time. Market opportunities appear, mature and morph into the next at an ever increasing and frightening pace. New product and service innovations that are exactly what the market demands are no longer enough. Company assets and strategy must align to deliver and support the right product if it is to be a success. Aligning new product innovation with company strategy is the aiming device by which your resources and assets can be concentrated on market opportunities to maximize success.

This month's AeA Product Development program presents a theory, discussion and methodology by which your company’s best innovation efforts can be harnessed and channeled to produce products and services that fully support company strategy. In addition to increasing the top line with a larger number of innovations to realize significant market share capture, there are cost advantages as well. A successful result will lower cost by maximizing manufacturing production and attaining full plant utilization while optimizing the effectiveness of marketing and distribution resources and reducing the need for service and support.
 

March 26th

Screening of Development Ideas and Portfolio Management

Your ideation process has created a nice list of promising opportunities, but which one is the right opportunity to invest in? And what is the most this opportunity can absorb by way of resources at this stage given all the other opportunities you are already working on?

This month's AeA Product Development program will feature a panel of experts discussing the tools and practices in screening ideas, making go / no-go decisions and managing product development resources throughout the product development cycle.
 

April 23rd

Design & Development in a Web 2.0, Social Media Marketplace - Crossing the Concept to Design & Development Cultural Divide Between Sales, Marketing, and Engineering

Anyone who has been involved in the product development process recognizes that sales, marketing, engineering and manufacturing all have different market-product-customer perspectives and seem to speak a different language. Additional factors include the ease of facilitating the voice of the customer (VOC) with the ubiquity of Web 2.0, two-way conversation tools. If you aren’t listening and tapping into the online conversations-your competition is.

This can lead to sub optimizing the organization's potential if effective collaborative processes are not implemented in making product decisions. Cross functional teams at the front end of the process can serve to resolve conflicting organizational perspectives and requirements by assuring
1) the products to be produced have a large and profitable market,
2) the proposed design incorporates a feature set aligned to key customer needs,
3) the proposed design can be completed within a reasonable timeframe and cost and
4) the design supports an efficient manufacturing process for large scale production.

Such front end collaboration can create a well thought out plan that evaluates opportunities, risks, costs, competition and other factors to support development of a viable product for which there a current, sustainable and profitable market. Front end collaboration can easily (economically) include listening to your raving fan customers to verify the direction your development is taking. Take your customers' pulse on your roadmap-without logging more airline miles.

The view that if you design and build a product using "cool technology" they will buy it has caused many companies to falter and sometimes fail. Learn how to bridge the cultural divide between sales, marketing, and engineering by learning what it takes to reconcile the technology WOW FACTOR with WHO CARES.

This month's AeA Product Development program you will learn why focusing on today’s sales issues will not tell you where you need to be when the product development is ready to launch. Learn what it takes to create a cross functional product development team with aligned perspectives and a common language.
 

May 28th

Product Planning – What Should a Product Plan Encompass

Product planning encompasses three primary activities: Defining the right products to pursue in the first place (fuzzy front end activities and portfolio management), developing products the right way the first time (product definitions and requirements, product development processes), and managing the product throughout the lifetime of the customer (customer satisfaction and retention, product extensions, product obsolescence).

This month's AeA Product Development program will focus on the planning steps required to go from the concept stage through the development phase. Topics will include techniques and tools - including social media and other online Web 2.0 tools - that can be used to capture and communicate voice of the customers (market requirements and product definitions), product roadmaps, product platforms and defining a set of project metrics to successfully manage the project though the go/ no-go decision gates. We will discuss how the companies employing best practices define stage gate and their frequency, expected results at each gate and how they decide if a project should proceed to the next development phase.
 

June 25th

Design to Requirements – Trade off Tools/Lean Tools

"If we know what the problem is, we can find a solution" Nam Pyo Suh.

Problem definition is one of the most important steps of product design.

This month‘s AeA Product Development program will feature a panel of experts to discuss the application of good design principles that you can apply in creating a customer-value design process that translates VOC into correct engineering requirements.
 

July 23rd

Product Launch In a Web 2.0 World

Build a better mouse trap and customers will beat a path to your door. Or will they?

You have done your homework and are in the process of developing an innovative new mouse trap that is sure to knock the socks off the competition. But you know from experience that customers won’t beat a path to your door just because you have a better mouse trap. Go to market strategy and launch planning is an integral part of new product development.

We’ll also look at a new element of the product launch: the role of social media and Web 2.0. Specifically, how building a community around your brand, your company and your new product can payoff at product launch.

We’ll look at case studies that used a Social Media Product Launch successfully.

This month's AeA Product Development program discusses the need to plan the marketing and sales strategy early on in the NPD cycle and what a product launch plan needs to encompasses to insure early market success and future market expansion.
 

August

Dark

September 24th

Performing a Powerful Product Retrospective: Experience Alone Does Not Teach; Reflection and Introspection on Experience Teaches

Any automobile manufacturer will tell you that their racing program improves the breed, that lessons learned in the grueling caldron of high horsepower competition make the car you buy perform better and last longer. Is it really true? What really is the process by which lessons learned from product development, manufacturing and product support make their way back into the next new product development cycle?

Like anything else in your business, unless it is a priority and there is a process to insure that it happens, it probably won’t happen. New product information regarding manufacturability, quality, customer experience and service records all exist in most companies.

This month AeA Product Development Program will focus on a strategy for aggregating appropriate data, a process for drawing actionable conclusions that will actually improve future product generations and a prescription for making the most important lessons learned part of company culture and incorporated in new product development best practice.
 

October

Dark

November 19th (date moved due to holiday)

Expanding Your Design & Development Mindset - How to bring innovation, customer insights and market direction into the process?

This session will discuss approaches to bring innovation into the organization. Including how to integrate the best thinking, findings and current insights gleaned from your customers, partners and competitors:

• Open Innovation and Open Sourcing: A global world means that our knowledge is widely distributed. Companies in this environment cannot afford to rely just on their own research. Open innovation is about how you buy or license from other companies, as well as how you can monetize your internal inventions outside of the company’s core products and services.
• Structured Frameworks and Tool Sets: There a several promising frameworks and tools to improve innovative thinking. We will explore at least one framework and tool set for generating innovative ideas and to provide solutions to difficult problems.
• The Customer as the Source of Innovation: Your customers and prospects are talking online through social media, and online customer communities supported by Web 2.0 tools. Are you listening? Learn how your organization can identify and mine the online customer communities flourishing in your industry and market segment. Develop a new awareness of how to use the new tools to amplify your development insights. You will gain new ideas for obtaining customer  insights from the 7/24 online conversation that is taking place. Learn how to develop your own online customer user-community to enhance the understanding of your market.

This month's AeA Product Development program will take a look at exploring these frameworks, how they are being applied and how they can have benefit for what you are doing in product development.

December

Dark - Join us for the Holiday Reception