Managing innovation processes: Agile, SCRUM, and other innovation tools

The course Management of Product Development focuses on the challenges faced and decisions to be made when managing new product development processes as a member of a product development project team. As such, the most important strategic and tactical planning and implementation decisions will be covered that are required to successfully develop and launch new products. Research on making these decisions has proceeded in many academic fields, such as operations management, engineering, marketing, quality management, technology management, organizational behavior and strategic management, with incomplete links across those fields. Since product development project teams typically consist of multiple functions, this course provides an interdisciplinary coverage of the major theoretical insights derived in these different fields about managing new product development, such as:

• New product key success factors

• Development processes and practicalities

• Front end management

• Portfolio management,

• Interfunctional integration,

• New product development control and performance metrics

• Engineering and project management tools

• Accelerating product development and market entry timing decisions

The course relies on scientific articles, lectures, discussion sessions and project teaching. Students will be expected to independently develop a deliberate understanding of the required key terms, theories, models and frameworks, to make conncetions among and critically reflect on these and to autonomously apply their learnings in initiating, planning, and carrying out a new product development project. Just like in practice, the product development project is characterized by a limited time frame for making decisions and performing activities based on incomplete information.

By the end of this course, students are able to:

• discuss the key challenges faced and the decisions that need to be made in designing, organizing, and managing open and closed innovation processes.
• discuss terms, theories, models, tools, and frameworks to successfully manage and develop new products, services, and processes with long-term social and environmental benefits; and
• apply the relevant theories, models, and frameworks in solving innovation challenges and give recommendations on how to improve them.

You must meet one of the following collections of requirements

• Collection 1
• Completed Final examination Bsc program
• Collection 2
• Completed Pre-Master

• Approximately fifteen scientific articles from high quality academic journals
• Lecture slides and notes