Managing Product Platforms

The Challenges of Organizational and Process Integration

Masterclass of Marc H. Meyer, professor Innovation & Entrepreneurship, on integrating platform thinking into Stage Gate product development processes.

Over the past several decades there has been a substantial activity in industry to define and implement common components and subsystems within and across product lines. We refer to this shared technology as "product platforms". The goal is to improve quality, reduce Cost of Goods, shorten development cycles, and to provide a pathway to more systematically introduce next generation technology across various product lines and services.


Not with standing all good intentions, many if not most corporations continue to struggle with the platform concept due to:

• Definitional problems, where there is no common definition of what a product platform is, and is not, nor are their accepted definitions for product line or reference architectures into which product platforms must be placed;
  
• Engineering cultural problems, where proud engineering teams refuse to sacrifice any degree of flexibility in solution definition that must come when engineered designs use centrally defined and engineered subsystems, materials, or components;
  
• Organizational problems, where there is no empowered architecture definition body to define and share reference architectures for successive generations of product lines, nor specific, resourced engineering teams to design and implement product platforms designed explicitly to serve or scale to the needs of individual product lines, and of their target end-use applications.
  
• Process related problems, where the notion of a product platform - which is ostensibly multi-product - runs head on into conventional implementations of stage-gate systems that are explicitly single product focused.
  

In addition to be a professor at Northeastern University, and a Visiting Professor at TU Delft, Dr. Meyer has been an active consultant with leading corporations. His focus has been on developing next generation products and systems for new as well as current market applications, where the products themselves are designed to use powerful internal technology platforms. The companies he has served over the past decade include IBM and EMC in computers, P&G and Mars in consumer products, and Caterpillar and DuPont in industrial products. In each of these firms, teams have developed or renewed major new product lines that leverage new internal technology platforms.

In retrospect, the organizational and process implications of their respective platform strategies have often been more challenging than the technology itself. In some cases, we have met the challenges, and in others, not as well. Dr. Meyer will share these experiences with PDMA.NL in what promises to be a dynamic, interactive, and solutions-focused session.

About Marc H. Meyer
Marc H. Meyer is the Robert J. Shillman Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Matthews Distinguished Professor of Business at Northeastern University. In 2006, Dr. Meyer started Northeastern's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group in the College of Business, where he has helped many students and alumni start their own companies. He is also the Director of the High Technology MBA, a program focused on entrepreneurial innovation within established corporations. In addition, he leads Northeastern's executive education programs in innovation and corporate venturing.

Dr. Meyer is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of innovation. The Power of Product Platforms (written with Alvin P. Lehnerd, The Free Press, NY, NY, 1997), continues to be a leading work in the management of architecture for products, systems, and services. The Fast Path to Corporate Growth: Leveraging Knowledge and Technologies to New Market Applications (Oxford University Press, 2007), links innovation with enterprise growth and is used by industry leaders such as IBM to develop and operationalize growth strategies. In his new book, Entrepreneurship: An Innovator's Guide to Startups and Corporate Ventures, Dr. Meyer returns to his roots as a technology entrepreneur. He has been part of the start-up teams of software companies that include VenturCom (acquired by Citrix), Sentillion (acquired by Microsoft), and Acustream (Great Falls, VA), and advises many more startups, particularly those launched from Northeastern University. He has also designed next generation products and business strategies in the consumer, industrial, healthcare, and financial sectors for corporations that include Proctor and Gamble, Mars, Inc., Pinnacle Foods, Caterpillar, McKesson, BAE Systems, Lincoln National Reinsurance (SwissRe), and Partners Healthcare. It is the richness of these diverse experiences that Dr. Meyer brings to his teaching and research.

Dr. Meyer is a graduate of Harvard College and holds graduate degrees from M.I.T. While a PhD student in his mid-20s, he left MIT for five years to build his first software company, a leader in real-time embedded operating systems and development tools. Since then, he has been a Visiting Professor and a Scientist at M.I.T.