Brad Goldense

Approximately 150 Complimentary Publications are available to the public on GGI's web site. Complimentary content feeds through Twitter [@GoldenseGroup] and two blogs in Tumblr almost immediately. Many of them may be found in this publications section in LinkedIn.

Approximately 150 Proprietary Publications, for purchase, may be found through "The Wisdom iStore" which is the secure internet store located on GGI's web site. Major categories include Market Research, Technical… Show more

Approximately 150 Complimentary Publications are available to the public on GGI's web site. Complimentary content feeds through Twitter [@GoldenseGroup] and two blogs in Tumblr almost immediately. Many of them may be found in this publications section in LinkedIn.

Approximately 150 Proprietary Publications, for purchase, may be found through "The Wisdom iStore" which is the secure internet store located on GGI's web site. Major categories include Market Research, Technical Publications, and Seminar Coursebooks. Show less

Product developers have been practicing make-versus-buy analysis for decades. Typically, it focuses on whether to outsource the manufacture of components or subassemblies already designed and developed in-house. However, since the early 2000s and the publishing of Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Economy by Henry Chesbrough, these make-versus-buy considerations have been moving upstream into design and development. This is what industry now refers to as Open Innovation… Show more

Product developers have been practicing make-versus-buy analysis for decades. Typically, it focuses on whether to outsource the manufacture of components or subassemblies already designed and developed in-house. However, since the early 2000s and the publishing of Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Economy by Henry Chesbrough, these make-versus-buy considerations have been moving upstream into design and development. This is what industry now refers to as Open Innovation (OI): Should our company invent a new feature our customers want, or has another company already done it? Can we acquire it or license something that already exists that meets our need? Is partnering or allying with the competitor the best alternative if they have something close that does not exactly (yet) meet our needs?

Or, should we make the investment and incur the likely time-to-market penalty for doing it all ourselves from scratch?

What is the best way to realize our design intent?

OI is not quite make-versus-buy for scientists and design engineers, but it is highly analogous. As OI overcomes the resistance to adapting a not-invented-here idea, it will become easier to access and act on ideas from outside the company. As these practices grow and mature, product developers will begin making different decisions when presented with the design challenges any new product presents.

Many companies are beginning to wade into the waters of OI. The idea is in its infancy and clearly there are mixed results across industries. Only Procter & Gamble has publicly touted its financial successes arising from open approaches. As of now, there is little in the way of infrastructures within companies that let scientists and engineers quickly locate appropriate alliances or find ready-to-go plug-and-play solutions. The train is on the tracks however. GGI took a snapshot of industry’s evolving capabilities in 2013. Show less

Among the most-satisfying experiences for an engineer is to be part of a product that’s New to The Industry or New To The World. The satisfaction of seeing your creation touted by the media, consumers, and the like is hard to match. Yet, a very small percentage of products released to market are truly new.

How do you increase the odds of designing a completely new product? Consider these questions. Does your company:

-Execute focus groups better than its competitors?
-Do a… Show more

Among the most-satisfying experiences for an engineer is to be part of a product that’s New to The Industry or New To The World. The satisfaction of seeing your creation touted by the media, consumers, and the like is hard to match. Yet, a very small percentage of products released to market are truly new.

How do you increase the odds of designing a completely new product? Consider these questions. Does your company:

-Execute focus groups better than its competitors?
-Do a better job mining the plethora of data available from customer tracking and point-of-sale systems than its competitors?
-Have significantly more capable people in it than other companies in your industry?

If the answer to these questions is generally no, you and your company may want to investigate Lead User Analysis (LUA).

Several companies have developed successful new products, thanks to LUA. Bose Corp., for example, can trace its meteoric rise in the stereo-equipment industry to an analysis that showed in the 1960s that there was a large market of high-end audiophiles who would pay thousands of dollars for speakers with accurate sound reproduction. Sony used LUA in developing the WalkMan, a product that kicked off the wearable electronics movement in the early 1980s. MiniMed’s wearable insulin pump in the early 1990s, now a Medtronic product, was also developed in part due to LUA.

LUA has been around for several decades, yet few companies have systematically deployed it. Instead, companies continue to center on focus groups, data mining, emotional intelligence studies, and the like. That’s because these techniques are familiar and do not require something different be done for every project, and management readily accepts them. However, they rarely result in truly new products. Show less

Design engineers, program managers, and organizational leaders are likely seeing an increase in processes used to guide research and development. GGI has researched the subject since 1998 and we’ve seen a new wave of them the past five years, spurred by the need for western companies to improve their innovation to compete.

The change is not as pronounced for Product-Development processes. In 2008, 76% of companies had one or two processes to guide development projects. Forty percent of… Show more

Design engineers, program managers, and organizational leaders are likely seeing an increase in processes used to guide research and development. GGI has researched the subject since 1998 and we’ve seen a new wave of them the past five years, spurred by the need for western companies to improve their innovation to compete.

The change is not as pronounced for Product-Development processes. In 2008, 76% of companies had one or two processes to guide development projects. Forty percent of companies used one process and 36% used two. This year, the number of companies running with a single process decreased to 35% as companies added more processes. Most notably, the number of North American companies using four or more processes nearly doubled.

Historically, European companies have always used four to five processes such as new platform, platform derivative, regular new product, product extension, and cost reduction or value engineering as representative categories. The reasons for the slight rise in North American processes are unclear. It is hard to believe North American leaders actively guided their companies toward more processes. We believe the increase stems from the evolution of globalization. More European companies are operating in North America and it appears to be affecting product-development processes. Show less

The vast majority of all R&D spending across the globe goes to projects and programs. So, project and program measures are perhaps the most important metrics for facilitating R&D performance.

If a company performs poorly on a project, this fact is immediately visible to its employees. If less-than-desired performance continues across multiple projects over time, the failures usually become visible to outsiders as well and begin to affect branding, reputation, and pricing. A company can… Show more

The vast majority of all R&D spending across the globe goes to projects and programs. So, project and program measures are perhaps the most important metrics for facilitating R&D performance.

If a company performs poorly on a project, this fact is immediately visible to its employees. If less-than-desired performance continues across multiple projects over time, the failures usually become visible to outsiders as well and begin to affect branding, reputation, and pricing. A company can usually recover from a single product that does not live up to expectations. When product development repeatedly falls short of expectations, the whole company feels the pain.

When it comes to measuring output, sometimes companies confuse projects with products. The distinction between them is important for two reasons. First, a project doesn’t make money. It is a mini cost center that accumulates costs and organizes people for a development effort. A project is a temporary organization formed to develop one or more products.

From a measurement viewpoint, companies need measures for projects along with measures of the products being developed. Show less

You’ve probably noticed that there is a growing interest in measuring functional and technical competencies for scientists, engineers, and designers. This trend is a response to the flattening of organizations that have leaned themselves out. In lean organizations, there are typically fewer hierarchical levels but more practitioners at any given level.

This flatter structure is often described in terms of ratios. Lean organizations typically have management-to-staff ratios of 1:7 to 1:11… Show more

You’ve probably noticed that there is a growing interest in measuring functional and technical competencies for scientists, engineers, and designers. This trend is a response to the flattening of organizations that have leaned themselves out. In lean organizations, there are typically fewer hierarchical levels but more practitioners at any given level.

This flatter structure is often described in terms of ratios. Lean organizations typically have management-to-staff ratios of 1:7 to 1:11 or higher. “Managers” in these organizations typically earned that title based on strong technical or functional skills. In nonlean organizations, expert managers could completely oversee the work of direct reports and still have the time and bandwidth to spot and avert errors that would otherwise escape from their departments.

In lean organizations, complete oversight is not always a realistic expectation. Hence, lean organizations need a way to put equivalent quality checks in place using a different method. Today, the goal is to ensure practitioners have the best possible chance of avoiding or catching errors themselves. Show less

Until about 10 years ago, most companies practiced product development. But they considered any exploratory activities that preceded it to be too risky, too lengthy, and have too low an ROI. It was easier to listen to customers’ needs and then develop products that would have known markets when launched. Plus, many management programs pushed them in that direction. The “customer-satisfaction” and “total-quality-management” movements of the 1980s, followed by “voice of the customer” and “product… Show more

Until about 10 years ago, most companies practiced product development. But they considered any exploratory activities that preceded it to be too risky, too lengthy, and have too low an ROI. It was easier to listen to customers’ needs and then develop products that would have known markets when launched. Plus, many management programs pushed them in that direction. The “customer-satisfaction” and “total-quality-management” movements of the 1980s, followed by “voice of the customer” and “product definition – requirements management” and “time-to-market” focus of the 1990s, placed great emphasis on delivering what was explicitly asked for as fast as possible.

Only a few industries — such as pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical, and semiconductor — have routinely and necessarily focused on underserved markets instead of underserved customers. These industries operate on the philosophy of “build it and they will come.” As such, they have invested in the preproduct development activities of basic research, applied research, and advanced development to a much larger extent.

In the late 1990s, the pendulum began to swing. Globalization had put great pressure on profit margins. Markets began to be shared by more companies, and more competitors began appearing regularly. The tech upstarts and resultant boom of the late 1990s had given industry a taste for the profits and prestige that “new” products could bring. It is no wonder the 2000s spawned a focus on innovation. What company doesn’t want higher brand value and market share, a higher stock price, and growing revenues with higher profits, not to mention the pride their engineers and designers feel when customers worship their products?

Of course, companies are more interested in profits than in the self-esteem of their engineers and developers. So after the tech boom, market-leading companies increased investments and formalized their advanced processes. Now, a decade later, advanced processes are permeating industries. Show less

The study of innovation has been growing steadily for a decade and will continue to grow for at least another decade. Researchers are mapping the brain, developing artificial intelligence, simulating combinational molecular chemistry, engaging in crowdcasting and crowdsourcing using the Internet and a host of other activities that are leading to improved abilities to innovate across industries. The tools and enabling technology available to folks sitting at their desks, and to groups and teams… Show more

The study of innovation has been growing steadily for a decade and will continue to grow for at least another decade. Researchers are mapping the brain, developing artificial intelligence, simulating combinational molecular chemistry, engaging in crowdcasting and crowdsourcing using the Internet and a host of other activities that are leading to improved abilities to innovate across industries. The tools and enabling technology available to folks sitting at their desks, and to groups and teams chartered with bringing improved products to market, are getting better every day.

Right now, we know enough about innovation to talk about early market results. We cannot yet determine what the best long-run tools will be to achieve it consistently. But there are already 300 of these tools available that are being kick-tested by companies today. Some are gaining traction. Offerings span self-help, group-help, and sharing and structuring knowledge. Some products actually increase the available domain knowledge in brainstorming sessions and enable companies to better innovate themselves out of specific problems. Show less

Rapid innovation delivered with a maximum amount of proprietary IP has been a mantra for western corporations over the past decade. Many of those corporations are increasingly challenged to keep up. The growing number of legitimate competitors and continuing technological advancements have upped the ante on maintaining the necessary “factorylike innovation.” Size, legacy, budgets, and a host of other factors hinder intrapreneurship and the ability to change quickly. Historically, all… Show more

Rapid innovation delivered with a maximum amount of proprietary IP has been a mantra for western corporations over the past decade. Many of those corporations are increasingly challenged to keep up. The growing number of legitimate competitors and continuing technological advancements have upped the ante on maintaining the necessary “factorylike innovation.” Size, legacy, budgets, and a host of other factors hinder intrapreneurship and the ability to change quickly. Historically, all corporations suffered this same malaise and the playing field remained level. Corporations also enjoyed significant barriers to quick, nimble competitors. Engineering departments, testing labs, and manufacturing plants take months to staff and build; never mind what they cost.

Enter the new kid on the block, the “Individual Manufacturer.” Technological advancements continue to lower the cost of many entry barriers. For example, one new business option is the short-term rental of industrial capabilities. Today, individuals with ideas or inventions can hire design teams and get access to rapid-prototyping equipment and, ultimately, to companies dedicated to contract manufacturing for third parties. Today, this can be done at reasonable rates and for relatively short times.

Many engineers and technically savvy folks already have their own CAD and analysis systems at home and work directly with prototyping and manufacturing-service providers. This so-called Maker Movement is gaining momentum after being loosely organized since the mid-2000s. Since then, Maker cycle-times have gotten shorter and their numbers have been growing. Collectively, Makers are becoming a disruptive innovative force, analogous to the rapid emergence of global competition a decade ago. Show less

Product developers enjoyed a fairly predictable environment for most of last century. After the arrival of the assembly line early in the century, changes in design and manufacturing were incremental and companies of all kinds could easily adopt and then benefit from new practices. But over the past 30 years, product developers have had to stay on their toes as the processes, tools, and environment in which they work have grown more complex and sophisticated.