Value Innovation Portfolio Management: Achieving Double-Digit Growth Through Customer Value

The quest for successful products — and a simple, predictable way to determine in advance which products will be successful — is a core concern of all companies. Most firms use financial projections to select the best portfolio of products in which to invest their limited human and capital resources and are frustrated repeatedly by under-forecast sales, lower than expected margins, and outright failures of new products.

Value Innovation Portfolio Management addresses this core concern by showing you a more reliable decision-making method based on high customer value, tight business strategy alignment, and optimal investment intensity. These inputs will enable your company to invest more wisely and create more successful new products. Best-in-class companies like Motorola, DuPont, and Hewlett-Packard have used customer value in crafting winning portfolios. Supported by various case studies and examples, the authors demonstrate the significantly improved results that can be achieved from using customer value as the business driver for creating a portfolio of products.

Value Innovation Portfolio Management is a must read for senior executives and anyone involved in strategic planning, portfolio management, product development, sales and marketing, and R&D. Senior executives will discover a path to achieving double-digit growth, greater market share and improved shareholder value. The managers and teams involved directly in the product development process will learn how to create a robust and thorough product definition process aligned with the portfolio management of the enterprise.

Key Features:

• Provides senior executives the means to better evaluate portfolio decisions based on the alignment of their firm’s product portfolios with the company vision and strategy, and explains why senior executive direct involvement is essential for creating successful portfolios
• Details the deficiencies of traditional financially based approaches to product portfolio management, discusses the root causes of new product disappointments and methods for eliminating them
• Reveals how companies can find and exploit white space, or unfulfilled niches in the market, by shifting their focus to customer value as a top portfolio measure
• Explodes common conceptions of customer value and how to measure it, thus enabling linkage to lean, Six Sigma, and other process improvement programs
• Includes comparative case studies and examples from companies such as BASF, DuPont, IBM, Clorox, and the Scotts Company to illustrate the merits of a customer value approach to new product portfolios
• Guides VPs, Directors and Managers to a path of simpler and more effective product portfolio management and explains how best to communicate product plans to senior executives

About the Authors

Sheila Mello is the managing partner of Product Development Consulting, Inc, an internationally recognized firm that helps organizations optimize the process of developing products and services. She is a well-respected expert in portfolio management, product definition practices, and product development process improvements and has over two decades of executive and hands-on experience in product development, hardware engineering, software development, manufacturing, and marketing. She is the author of Customer-Centric Product Definition: The Key to Great Product Development and has taught the Center for the Management of Quality (CQM) senior executive management course.

Ron Lasser has worked at PDC since 2000 specializes in helping clients quickly recover from product development problems. He is able to increase his clients' ability to deliver projects on time and on budget by applying his years of experience managing engineering organizations. He has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and holds MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering, also from Carnegie Mellon University. Ron is a member of Sigma Xi, a research society for learning and science, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Wayne Mackey's expertise is grounded in more than 20 years of hands-on management of large engineering, manufacturing, and procurement organizations. His management consulting focuses on product/service development, especially in areas of collaborative design, metrics, supply chain management, and business strategy implementation. He is a senior IEEE member and a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), the IEEE Engineering Management Society, the IEEE Information Theory Society, the Society of Concurrent Engineering (SOCE) and the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). Mr. Mackey has been a Principal with Product Development Consulting, Inc. since 1997.

Richard Tait's accomplishments are highlighted by a 22-year research, management, and consulting career with DuPont that included positions as senior research physicist for DuPont Central Research and Development, planning manager for DuPont Corp. R&D Planning, and R&D lab director for DuPont Diagnostic Imaging. He also was a founding member and innovation manager for the DuPont Center for Creativity and Innovation. Mr. Tait was a co-developer of the Institute for Inventive Thinking for the National Inventors Hall of Fame.