AcknowledgementWe are grateful to members and managers of the product development teams for their willingness to share thier time and insights for this project. We also thank: John Carroll, Don Clausing, Steve Graves, Shoji Shiba, John Sterman. Bob Thomas. Karl Ulrich, and David Walden for their constructive criticism and helpful suggestions. AbstractIn collaboration with industry partners, a normative model of the product concept decision process was developed, supported with tools and techniques, and codified as a decision support process for product development teams. This process (Concept Engineering) was then introduced into a number of product development teams in different companies. A comparative analysis of actual product concept development activities, with and without the use of Concept Engineering, was conducted. All of the observed teams viewed time to market as a critical measure of their success. However, the development processes differed significantly depending on whether relatively more emphasis was placed on time or market considerations. Key variables associated with the product concept development decision process and time-to-market dynamics were identified and a theory of the concept development process was developed using the inductive system diagram technique, a research methodology developed in the course of this work.We believe this work contributes to the operations management literature in three ways. First, it introduces a very detailed, structured decision process for product concept development, enhancing the literature on Quality Function Deployement (QFD). Second, it presents a theory of product concept development that can improve understanding of success and failure in product concept development. Third, this work develops new methodology (Inductive Systems Diagrams) for field work in operations management. This methodology marries the grounded theory methods familiar to sociologists with causal-loop modeling familiar to systems dynamicists, yielding a rigorous tool for systematically collecting, organizing, and distilling large amounts of field-based data.

IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT, “getting it right the first time” is the dream of every manager. What Gary Burchill wanted to distill from his corporate‐based research was a strategy that would allow decision‐makers to come as close to that ideal as possible. Concept Engineering is the result, a step‐by‐step process and analytical tools that refine the concept‐development stages of a project in ways that shorten the time to market by substantially reducing misdirected efforts and changes.