On November 27, 2004, the German Chapter of the IEEE EMS invited to a seminar about „New Product Development“ in Munich. The seminar was well accepted with about 15 participants various industries out of the Munich area.

The seminar discussed aspects of product development from different view points. In the first talk, Dr. Axel Richter (Steag HamaTech AG) presented the approach towards product development from a process view and dicussed the influence of corporate culture on the process of product development.

Highly acclaimed was his notion of the “boss bypass” as a general short-cut disturbing the development process and disturbing the disturbing necessary elements of a positive innovation culture like motivated employees, free space for innovation, flexible structures and tolerance towards failure.
In the second talk, Dirk Weidemann (Cap Gemini Deutschland GmbH) talked about development lifecycles in industry automation. He discussed the aspects of product planning, support, mainenance and enhancement of the respective product. In his summary, he underlined that key factors include competence within the development team on a long-term basis, standards for sustainable products to be up-to-date in the market on a long term basis and finally accepted processes to ensure a safe product development process.

After a short coffee break, Andreas Beu from User Interface Design GmbH presented his view on the topic of product development focusing on design issues that arise while working in the early stages of product development. Early, “touchable” prototypes thus are a very necessary part of the development process to be able to find any flaws in the design and correct any errors as early as possible. Finally, the notion of prototyping picked up in the final talk by Daniel Moses (Hilf! GmbH). In a number of case studies, Mr. Moses gave answers from the field of extreme programming which would have helped to avoid the problems. Even though many of the case studies provided a quick laugh on first sight, the consequences of the presented problems and flaws show the immense difficulty in product design within complex systems and high time pressure.

After the final lecture, the participants sat together for lunch and had the opportunity to further discuss the different aspects of product design and development.