Lean Product Development: Nothing New Under the Sun?

Abstract

The concept of lean product development has attracted the attention of many scholars since its inception in the 1990s derived from practices at Toyota Motor Company. Key to this approach to new product development are a few methods derived from lean production as well as longer established practices, such as concurrent engineering. This makes one wonder whether lean product development is a new practice, a new method or an encapsulation of already existing methods at the time; this quest about the roots and tenets of lean product development, also in comparison to other methods for new product development, is the onus of this paper. This journey takes this propositional paper not only to the roots of lean product development and the context of its era of conception, but also to what this concept adds to other extant methods for new product development. Particularly, this comparison draws out that other methods are trying to achieve the same objectives: the creation of products and services with value to the customer, the reduction of time-to-market and the efficient use of resources. This inference implies that managers of new product (and service) development can choose from a wider pallet of methods and approaches to enhance the performance of R&D and to connect better to manufacturing (including supply chains). Inevitably, this has implications for research on (lean) product and service development; hence, this paper sets out a research agenda based on the deliberations and gaps that have been uncovered in the discourse.

Lean product development and agile project management in the construction industry

“…After the success of lean's application in the manufacture stage, companies started to realize that the new productive obstacle became the development of new products (Marodin, Frank, Tortorella, & Netland, 2018). At that moment, there were many attempts to apply the same lean principles to these development stages, the result was the LPD (Salgado & Dekkers, 2018).…”

“…• Set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE): it is a concept originated from manufacture that was highlighted in literature mainly after the publication of Ward, Liker, Cristiano, and Sobek's (1995) article, in which the model of Toyota's SBCE (Salgado & Dekkers, 2018) was presented. SBCE consists of the intentional effect of defining, discussing and exploring a series of possible sub-optimal solutions, instead of trying to modify and adapt one single solution (Ward, Liker, Cristiano, and Sobek, 1995).…”

“…Facing this scenario, researchers and professionals started to reinvent the current methods, arguing that existing methodologies were not always aligned with new challenges (Serrador & Pinto, 2015). In this context, several techniques, methodologies and alternative philosophies appeared, two of the most famous are lean product development (LPD) and agile project management (APM) (Salgado & Dekkers, 2018; Serrador & Pinto, 2015).…”

“…These methodologies originally came from companies connected to Information and Communication Technology and the automotive industry (Salgado & Dekkers, 2018). Despite new features regarding the subject, is it possible to question if these new methods of product development could be applied in traditional industries, such as civil construction, especially during its design stage.…”

Customer value in lean product development: Conceptual model for incremental innovations

“…10,12 According to Ref. 17, value has a different meaning for manufacturing and for product development (PD). When it comes to value stream mapping (VSM) in PD, information plays the same role materials in manufacturing.…”