The Power of Product Platforms

"Developing robust product families has been and continues to be one of the cornerstones of sustained corporate success."

"To achieve sustained success in new product development, a firm must continuously renew its platform architectures and their manufacturing processes by integrating advances in core product and process technology development."

"The power of platforms becomes all the more significant when horizontal leverage is combined with upward vertical scaling."

"The very first step in defining your platform strategy is to assemble a multidisciplined team composed of engineering, marketing, and manufacturing talent."

"Composite design methodology seeks to optimize product platform architecture through analysis and design of the subsystems that exist in all but the rarest of products."

"Successful innovation through teams has three ingredients: ownership, empowerment, and constancy."

"Platform and derivative product teams should be small and cross-functional?limited to dedicated individuals who collectively represent a range of functional skills and interests. "

"Not everybody must be involved in everything?only in those tasks that require common understanding and subsequent integration. "

"Bringing in an external market perspective can add great value to understanding performance."

"Platform improvements can open new markets for the same basic technology."

"A fundamental characteristic of information products is that the value of information, and therefore the value-added in producing information products, is pervasively influenced by the context of its use."

"Management processes should be elegant in their simplicity and effectiveness, with every element serving an important purpose."

"For a company to be able to bring a discontinuity to the industry, the CEO may have to introduce a discontinuity in the way employees think about today's problems and tomorrow's desires."