تقاطع نوآوری و مدیریت پروژه محصول : تجزیه و تحلیل مقایسه ای در صنعت خودرو

Projectification and platform approaches have been two main transformation trends implemented by industrial firms during the 1990s. For those firms, innovation management no longer deals with introducing radically and totally new products, but rather with applying innovative features within a regular stream of products and platforms. This paper proposes an analytical framework that can address the resulting interplay between innovative features and new products. This framework relies on the concept of innovation life-cycle management (ILCM). The paper presents the early results from the comparison of five case studies from three OEMs.

Projectification and platform approaches have been two main transformation trends for industrial firms in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. For those firms, innovation management no longer deals with introducing radically and totally new products, but more likely with applying innovative features within a stream of new products and platforms. This implies management of the interplay between the maturation of innovative features and the regular stream of development projects based on existing competencies. This paper proposes an analytical framework for a systematic comparison on innovation-product interplay management, and presents several early results based on data collected in the automotive industry. This sector provides an interesting empirical opportunity to study this question, since it faces a dramatic increase in the pace of launch both of new products and of innovative features. We first present the empirical drivers of this research, set up the research question, regarding the important literature on project-led organisation and learning. We then settle the theoretical framework and methodology for analyzing the innovation/product interplay. In the third part we present five case studies, resulting from data collected in European and Asian carmakers. We finally present several lessons learnt from the comparison of these five cases.

This paper questioned and enlarged the platform development and technology integration paradigms in projectified firms. Within the context of stabilized product lines, we considered the innovation challenge as the interplay between product/platform projects and innovative features. We developed a conceptual framework, based on the concept of innovation life-cycle management, in order to compare the evolution of features from their early emergence to their cross-products deployment. This framework characterizes both the process leading the innovation life-cycle and the performance related to this process. We presented an outlook of the application of this framework on five features introduced on various independent platform projects and firms. The results confirm the importance of interplay between product project portfolio management and innovation life-cycle management. The study reveals significant differences both in the way firms manage this interplay and the results they achieve in terms of time to market as customer value. The next phase of the research is to deploy a questionnaire-based approach for a systematic comparison of different ILCM practices and performance in the automotive industry.