Originally Published MX November/December 2002

BUSINESS PLANNING & TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

With four key changes in belief and behavior, company leaders can increase speed and improve project predictability.

Lisa Scheinkopf

When it comes to developing and marketing a new product, every company aspires to faster and more-predictable project completion. In an industry such as medical technology that is heavily regulated, deeply dependent on people with specific skill sets, and intimately linked to the accelerating rate of technological change, achieving greater speed and predictability in this area can seem like the impossible dream.

Bringing new products to market faster has obvious competitive advantages. First-mover benefits are likely to be enormous, of course: the difference between being the first one to market and the second often amounts to tens of millions of dollars in revenue in the weeks and months following product launch. Just as the payoff for being fast and first is typically huge, the effective penalty for lagging and arriving late is likewise staggering.