Product Innovation (EPT 192/3)

Historical research on firm-level innovation behavior results in the following main insight: firm-level decisions focusing on innovations are critical, difficult, and often result in failure to act. While acceptance is widespread among executives that firms must innovate radically as well as incrementally, success by firms mostly nurtures inertia and eventual failure rather than search and adoption of new superior technologies. What does it take to craft and maintain successful radical NPD programs? Managing Product Innovation (MPI) explains why both manufacturing and customer firms usually reject superior new technologies and how competitors new to the industry become successful (by focusing on previously unnoticed customers and offering higher performance with lower costs via the radically new technologies). MPI provides worthwhile answers on what specific actions executives in established and new firms can adopt to achieve successful radical NPD programs. Related to managing new NPD processes successfully and additional strategic marketing issues, the following few thoughts summarize the wisdom that Volume 13 elaborates upon:Leverage interfirm relationshipsPay attention to products that can be co-created by interfirm networksThink and act globally via personal contactsStay complex and be uncomfortable with success Evaluate NPD performance using a life cycle perspectiveIdentify upstream as well as direct influences on NPD performance.

New product design and development is often the result of personal vision. Harnessing this often requires a special receptiveness and enthusiasm at all levels of an organization, which serves to unlock potential and can turn the entire organizational pyramid upside-down. It is particularly important to understand and develop those aspects of design which can be constructively employed by designers in a strategic alliance with management and research.; The papers in this volume result from the conference of the Design Society held at the University of Central England in September 1998. They show how design-led product development has worked in a range of industries, from engineering through to design and management consultancy.

The objective of this book is to illustrate statistical methodologies that incorporate physical and numerical experiments and that allow one to schedule and plan technological innovation, similar to any other productive activity. This methodology should be implemented through a structured procedure aimed at reducing the high rate of commercial failure characterizing actual innovation processes. The definition of an iterative design activity is an objective that can be reached by subdividing the complex innovation process into "short" steps in experimental statistics research. The approach adopted to analyze customer needs and the tools used to reduce unwanted variability form the framework for the statistical design of "continuous" product innovation.Starting from the observation that product innovation is achieved when a "quality" that is able to satisfy a new customer need is conferred on the product and survives over real operating conditions and time, this book illustrates the operative steps required to perform the whole innovation process iteratively.

The 7th International Symposium on the Characterization of Porous Solids (COPS-VII) was held in the Congress Centre in Aix-en-Provence between the 25th-28th May 2005. The symposium covered recent results of fundamental and applied research on the characterization of porous solids. Papers relating to characterization methods such as gas adsorption and liquid porosimetry, X-ray techniques and microscopic measurements as well as the corresponding molecular modelling methods were given. These characterization methods were shown to be applied to all types of porous solids such as clays, carbons, ordered mesoporous materials, porous glasses, oxides, zeolites and metal organic frameworks.