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Thursday - 8:15am-9:30am  Innovative
Prototyping — Strategic Modeling as a Medium for Cost- Effective
Innovation
Michael Schrage,
author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies
Simulate to Innovate, will discuss how to cost effectively
use models, prototypes and simulations to drive innovation
initiatives.
Schrage will discuss
prototyping, modeling and simulations as the essential media to
manage innovative behavior and turning uncertainties into
manageable risks. He will review key elements for successful
prototyping including how to:
- recognize and exploit the unanticipated value of
prototypes
- determine the economics of prototyping and its
effect on organizational culture
- understand the trade-offs between modeling with too
much detail versus oversimplification
- measure prototyping paybacks: mean-time-to-payback
- avoid mismanagement of prototyping - know when the
costs outweigh the benefits
About Michael Schrage
Michael Schrage is one of the
world's leading advisors to organizations committed to cost
effectively using models, prototypes and simulations to drive
their innovation initiatives. His work on implementing strategic
and just-in-time experimentation is at the core of several
corporate transformation efforts. His insights on
"hyperinnovation" and "iterative capital" are redefining how
many companies are investing in both their supply chains and
their customers.
Schrage is a co-director at
the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative where he writes,
consults and collaborates in the design and deployment of
digital innovations in networked marketplaces. In 2000, Schrage
authored, Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies
Simulate to Innovate, where he explores the economics and
ethology of prototyping and design. He previously authored
Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration - the
first book to explore both the tools and the dynamics of
successful collaboration in business, science and the arts. His
1993 Design Management Journal contribution " The
Culture(s) of Prototyping" was awarded the magazine's Doblin
Prize for best article. He is columnist for Fortune Magazine and
his writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Wall
Street Journal, fast company, Wired, red Herring, Forbes ASAP,
Esquire, and many other publications.
Schrage is a Merrill Lynch Forum
Innovation Fellow and serves as the executive director of its
Innovation Grants Competition. He is co-creator of the
Rockefeller Foundation's Science for Development Prize and
co-inventor of PF Magic's (now Mattel's) best-selling line of
Catz and Dogz virtual pets.
His clients have included DeutscheBank,
Fujitsu, General Motors, Microsoft, Accenture, Mars, IDEO, TASC,
Merrill Lynch, McKinsey & Co., Mastercard, Procter & Gamble and
eRoom Technologies. |
Frisday - 8:30am-9:45am  Making
Money with Speed and Flexibility
Don Reinertsen,
co-author of Developing Products in Half the Time and
noted product development expert will explore the economic
trade-offs motivating customers to adopt more flexible
development processes and how to combine the benefits of
structure and flexibility.
Many companies have recognized that changes
late in a product development
project are expensive. They try to avoid such changes by
emphasizing rigorous up front decision-making and highly
structured processes. Unfortunately, these methods can add
rigidity to a development process and have unexpected side
effects such as:
- Forcing important decisions to occur before good
information is available.
- Discouraging the use of valuable but still evolving
technologies.
- Delaying work unnecessarily to wait for consensus.
- Substantially increasing effort invested for the sole
benefit of "the process".
This has caused many companies to consider approaches that
focus on carefully balancing the benefits of late changes
against their costs. Companies are increasingly examining
approaches that:
- Defer selected decisions until higher quality information
is available.
- Accelerate the creation of the information needed to make
these decisions.
- Modify process methodologies and product architectures to
make adjustments less painful.
Don Reinertsen will discuss the economic tradeoffs motivating
companies to adopt more flexible development processes. Extreme
process orientation can cause companies to lose their focus on
results. Absence of process can cause companies to keep
repeating the same painful mistakes. Don will examine the middle
path that seeks to combine the benefits of structure and
flexibility.
ABOUT DON
REINERTSEN
Don Reinertsen is President of
Reinertsen & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in the
management of the product development process. Before starting
his own firm, he had extensive consulting experience at McKinsey
& Co. an international management consulting firm, and operating
experience as Senior Vice President of Operations at Zimmerman
Holdings, a private diversified manufacturing company.
His contributions in the
field of product development have been recognized
internationally. In 1983, while a consultant at McKinsey & Co.,
he wrote a landmark article in Electronic Business magazine
which first quantified the value of development speed. This
article has been cited as the McKinsey study that indicated "six
months delay can be worth 33 percent of life cycle profits".
In the past fifteen years,
he has gone considerably beyond this early work. He has worked
with companies ranging from Fortune 500 Baldrige Award winners
to small venture capital backed start-ups. He has developed a
number of innovative analytical techniques for assessing the
product development process, and changing it.
Don holds a B.S. from
Cornell University in Electrical Engineering, and an M.B.A. with
distinction from Harvard Business School. He is a member of the
IEEE, SME, and ASQC. Don is coauthor of the best-selling book
"Developing Products in Half the Time", and author of the book,
"Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer's Toolkit". He
writes and speaks frequently on techniques for shortening
development cycles, and teaches a popular course at California
Institute of Technology on Streamlining the Product Development
Process. |
