Where is product development headed? What will the emphasis be in a decade? Our first two reviews provide two completely different answers to these questions. Michael McGrath, drawing a parallel with how information technology has transformed manufacturing, sees a move toward greater productivity and uniformity, assisted by modern technology advances that manage project knowledge better. This presumably leads to lower cost and higher quality.In contrast, Jim Highsmith and Ken Schwaber envision shifts toward greater agility to cope with growing uncertainty in markets, technologies, customer perceptions, and management direction. The benefits claimed are greater responsiveness and higher customer satisfaction.
that free up resources to build new core. This is essentially the topic of the final chapter: how to deal with the dilemma of repurposing resources that are tuned to managing nonmission critical context back into generating core. Moore also shows how outsourcing should be used as a kind of exhaust vent for work that no longer needs attention once it has been centralized, standardized, modularized, and optimized.Dealing with Darwin should be required reading for anyone responsible for business or product innovation or strategy. Its concepts are deceivingly simple yet worth spending the time to grapple with at a deeper level.
Books reviewed in this issue:
Build an Industry Hot Rod: The Nuts and Bolts of Leaving Competitors in the Dust
Innovating at the Top: How Global CEOs Drive Innovation for Growth and Profit
Determinants of Innovative Behaviour: A Firm's Internal Practices and Its External Environment
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.