A look back at my 2008 research at Aberdeen Group called “The Product Innovation Agenda 2010” to see whether or not my predictions came true, and bust those that didn’t
Product Portfolio Management
Should You “Exnovate” your Product Portfolio?
What I learned this week … came from a blog entry by Paul Hobcraft on Innovation Tools asking “What is ‘exnovation’ and where does it fit in the innovatin life cycle?” I found “exnovation” an intriguing term and an interesting concept. And then, as usual, I tried to think about how manufacturers could apply it to their product lifecycles to enhance product profitability.
One-to-One: Dassault Strives to Make 3D Accessible to All in the SMB with V6
I had a chance to talk with…the Dassault Systemes team about their recent V6R2010 product release. They reinforced their key messages during the conversation: SOA based on a single data model, powered by ENOVIA, leveraging 3D as a media. They also continue to speak of PLM 2.0, referring to the maturation of PLM from an engineering workgroup application to an value chain wide new product development and launch platform. I agree with this assertion – PLM has evolved in recent years to include the front end of innovation, product portfolio management, and direct materials sourcing; I always believed these were aspects of the PLM footprint, but organizations still approached each aspect of the product lifecycle in a siloed fashion. Now with this release, these tenets are accessible to the SMB market as well.
What I learned: This will be the year of SaaS in PLM
What I learned this week… came from conversations with manufacturers and SaaS vendors over the past year. I believe the market is ripe for a SaaS approach to PLM. When it comes to product development, every organization strives for efficiency, flexibility, better collaboration (internally and externally), and easier upgrades. Yet, business models that could enable such benefits, such as Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or even SOA, has not been widely adopted to support product lifecycle management. The ongoing economic malaise, however, is driving manufacturers to rethink how they deploy PLM, and other enterprise software systems.
One-to-One: Sopheon Hypes up its Customer Needs Management Capabilities
I had a chance to talk with… the team at Sopheon about their recent product enhancement in the customer needs management (CNM) space. Through an OEM agreement with German based idea management vendor, Hype Software, the product portfolio management company has announced Idea Lab, an idea discovery, management, collaboration and analytic offering – areas that were partially addressed by their existing idea management offering. With Sopheon’s existing portfolio management and product planning/roadmapping strengths, these additional capabilities at the very front end of innovation give it a strong offering in the customer needs management space.
