Product development performance has become a critical-to-success aspect in this age of globalization and international competition. Platform based strategy could be used to enhance and support the efficiency and effectiveness of product development performance, as this paper suggests. This paper explores the impact of platform-based strategy on product development flexibility, product developme...

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a powerful tool for teaching that helps students to get the best out of their effort in terms of the learning results obtained, even more in studies like university degree studies in engineering. A way of getting even more of this is by means of the adaptation of methodologies from different knowledge areas, because this allows the launch of innovative ways of wo...

Product development has increasingly become a cooperative endeavor that requires effective coordination in the face of highly complex inter-dependencies exposed by distribution over participants, time and perspectives. Distinct coordination support technologies have emerged for each of these kinds of distribution, but all face important limitations. This paper presents an integrated model of co...

Many impact assessment methods use weighing factors to agregate the different environmental effects into a single score value for the total impact caused by a product life cycle. The introduction of subjectivity in the decision process during product development, by using this kind of weighting factors, should be avoided. A more objective approach uses indicators based on laws of physics, for e...

Companies need to develop more sustainable products that fit into future more sustainable markets. For this reason, the integration of sustainability considerations is needed in the early stages of product development, where a major part of the sustainability performance of a final product is determined. The aim of the research presented in this doctoral thesis is to better understand both enab...

The industrial structure of many European countries is dominated by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Although SMEs consider the new product development process fundamental for success in the global market, the level of formalization of the innovation process is very low (Slywotzky [1]). The aim of this paper is to analyze in-depth a sample of SMEs located in a highly industrialized Italian ...

One of the Principal determinants of business success is technological innovation. New product development forms an important components of product policy and product management. A progressive firm has to consider new product development as a cardinal element of its product policy. New Product Development is the process adopted by organizations worldwide to develop products and services for cus...