Don Rickert Design

Balance & Interdisciplinary Synergy

Many disciplines are in involved in successfully bringing a product to market. Developing products is not simply a matter of requirements definition, nor is it just an engineering problem, a quality assurance problem, a design problem, a marketing problem or a consumer research problem alone. Product Development is a multi-faceted endeavor that requires the single-minded cooperation of all of the essential core competencies, forming a powerful interdisciplinary balance.  

In accord with the latest thinking in New Product Development, we view the essential core competencies as:

• Marketing
• Design
• Engineering
• Research

The proper balance, of course, varies according to the type of product and its target market. The balance is quite different for developing an enterprise software system than it is for creating a new carbon fiber violin or designing a new medical instrument.

 

Interdisciplinary Cooperation is Essential in NPD

Developing products is not simply an engineering problem, a design problem, a marketing problem or a research problem alone. It is a multi-faceted problem that requires the single-minded cooperation of all of the involved core disciplines.

It is essential that four core competencies and the many disciplines of which they are comprised work in an uncommonly close collaboration during the Front End of NPD. The core competencies are:

Marketing

• Product Marketing
• Marketing Communications
• Product Management

Design

• Industrial Design
• User Interface Design
• User Experience Design
• Graphic Design
• Packaging Design

Engineering

• Information Architecture
• Software Engineering
• Industrial Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering

Research

• Marketing Research
• Operations Research & Logistics
• Consumer Research (sometime called ‘Consumer Insights’)
• Human Factors & Ergonomics
• Usability Testing
• Ethnography (a.k.a. Observational Field Research)

Other Specialty Disciplines

It is often necessary to bring in, as needed, experts from specialty disciplines or sub- disciplines, such as—

• Traditional Anthropology/Ethnography
• Acoustics
• Architecture
• Medical Devices
• Affective Human Factors
• RF Engineering
• etc.

The cultural change to make collaboration rather than competition among the core competency areas the norm is challenging but critical!