Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

Introduction

In the past man has been first. In the future the System will be first.

—Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911

With all due regards to Taylor, this one single line from the world of manufacturing has perhaps caused more damage to the entire knowledge industry in than? last hundred years than everything else put together. During the twentieth century, we blindly adopted this mantra without realizing that manufacturing and knowledge creation are two different worlds—they are like chalk and cheese in that what works in one doesn’t necessarily work in the other. Manufacturing is fundamentally a production problem, and knowledge creation is more like a design problem. Most certainly, there can’t be a ...