Here’s an excerpt of the session follow up article for Doug Powell’s session at PDMA’s PIM 2012 on “Why Things Go Wrong in Product Development & How to Improve,”  for Visions magazine, PDMA’s quarterly innovation and product development journal due out by mid-April:

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There was an energetic and responsive crowd in residence for my session “Innovative Product Development:  Why Things Go Wrong and How to Improve” at PDMA 2012. We covered a lot of ground in 45 minutes!  The key concepts discussed are summarized below:

The Basics

• Determining Root cause:  Root cause opens up great opportunities for innovation. A root cause is the base issue and acts as a binary switch:  it causes the problem when present  or, in its absence, the problem disappears.
• Change the question:  Ask “Why do we have the problem?” instead of “How do we solve the problem?”
• A new request:  Change the phrase “Don’t bring me a problem, bring me a solution,” to “Don’t bring me a problem, bring me a root cause.”
• …

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See the rest in the new digital Visions magazine at www.pdma.org.