“…Gaddis (1959) talks about the role of the project manager in technical work and how s/he must take the product through all phases of the lifecycle and Mee (1964), suggests a simple lifecycle model is required with phases including analysis, development and production. From this early writing little appeared in the operations management literature until more recently where considerations such as the need to manage innovation (Milewski et al, 2015), growing sophistication in product design (Papinniemi et al, 2014) and product control (He et al, 2006), more complex supply chains (Chiang and Trappey, 2007), the lifecycle-based trend towards servitization in manufacturing and engineering firms (Datta and Rajkumar, 2011, Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988, Baines et al, 2009, Martinez et al, 2017, Batista et al, 2017 and the growing sustainability agenda (Gmelin and Seuring, 2014, Bevilacqua et al, 2007, Mascle and Zhao, 2008 has reaffirmed the utility of product lifecycles models and increased overall interest in them.…”