Big picture thinking in new product development

Improving product development performance is an important goal for many organisations. The three companies involved in this research wanted to improve their product development performance through improved risk management and by identifying improvement opportunities for better reuse and invention of knowledge. To help them achieve this, five large-scale graphical templates were selected and developed for use within interactive workshops. These templates encouraged multi-functional New Product Development and R&D teams to work productively together to identify key issues and solve the problems identified. This paper presents the three case study companies and their problems, describes the graphical templates used and discusses the results and benefits from this “big picture” approach.