Tang: We have a natural grouping. We have some data of 51 questions which are statistically significant and strongly predict outcome. We created a questionnaire this way. So what I have here in this slide are 2 questions from the questionnaire. Question 1.2 and Question 7.2. These are kind of representative samples of the questions. One of the questions is project leaders experience. In the survey we found that project leaders’ experience is a strong predictor of some specific project outcomes which are shown here. And the several level capability are this. Namely, the project leader has a lot of experience. And her opinions are frequently sought after. That’s a strong leader. What’s a weak leader? A weak leader has very narrow experience, hasn’t done it before, and constantly needs work, needs help. And his work needs to be consistently reworked. And some where in between this are these. The way we designed this questionnaire was that we said at seven, you should be able to win Baldridge. That’s kind of the high bar we set for ourselves. So we expect very few of people to answer seven, and that indeed was the case. For example, transition to sales, one of the big questions is is the product ready for sales; engineers think it is ready for sales. Let me give you a perfect example from my own experience at IBM. Actually, IBM was one of the first companies that were doing research on inkjet printer. And lots of executives went to the research labs and they showed a liquid and show how you could shoot drops of ink into paper and form a letter. Great! Everyone said wonderful. Let’s keep going with that. They transferred the technology to the R&D labs. And they found the ink grew moldy in about 3 days. So you can’t very well shoot moldy ink. So that means you got to change the cartridge in two or three days. So an ability to transfer a technology from one environment to the other, and specifically, from manufacturing and engineering into sales is a fundamental determinant and predictor of profit and market share. So these are some of the indicators, for example, number seven is, pardon me if we are being a little bit too licentious about Baldridge. We felt that in the Baldridge sense, the transition to sale merits to seven if product readiness is a non-issue. And the reason it is a non-issue is because the sale organization has been working side by side with engineering, marketing and services as co-developers of a product. And they were solving problems as they went along, product problems, sales problems, training problems, education problems, so that is the highest level. This is very hard to achieve, number seven. This is where I would say, maybe half of US companies still have it. Namely, the engineering releases the product to sales. What does “releases to” means? That means it goes over the walk. Here it is, guys, catch it, have fun! We did our job. We will call you if you call us. Good companies do this. Product is validated with the users. There is a lot of the research done at MIT that says maybe somewhere, and these are aggregated numbers and they vary industry by industry, but 60% of product innovations are actually being implemented in the field by the customer. And those are called lead users. So smart companies, what they do is work with lead users, and in A/S 400 we were smart enough to do so. Working with Beta customers as full fledged team members, so release to sales was really very smooth and non destructive to the organization, and so on. So we are testing now this questionnaire with the company. And this is early testing validation and there is much more that we need to do, of course. Actually if you want to work with us, we will be happy to work with you on gathering more data on this. And what we did is we looked at all the answers; we sent the questionnaire to three different people in a product development organization, to the senior engineer to the marketing organization, to some other executive organization, finance maybe and so on. What we asked them is to answer the questions on the questionnaire. And where the questions have radical departure in the average or the mean of the responses, is what you see here. So where the mean varied by more than 2.4, this means that people varied widely in their responses to that question. This is interesting because what you see here is that only six questions for which there is a wide disparity in the way they responded. So what this means is that these six questions really need to be examined more closely in terms of the project and why people response differently. So we are doing that. And these are six questions: culture change management, customer satisfaction, main buyer decisions, product typing, and product volume, market shares and satisfaction with price for value. As you can imagine these are tough questions to answer, and it is not surprising that there is a wide difference in the response to these six questions. But the good news is that out of the questionnaire there were 73 questions there are only six questions that produced this wide variation. So it would be irresponsible for me to claim that the questionnaire is good. It would be safe to say, I think that these questionnaires are probably moving in the right direction. And many more case studies with more data that looks at the ‘whys’ responses would really help us understand probably a little better. You look at your watch, so I am about to wrap up.

In summary, so we surveyed organizations, we found the survey literature, we found product development factors there that are strong predictors of specific five outcomes versus saying you do these 352 things, you are going to do product development better, which is a no brainer. If you have got to do 302 things it’s like me telling you hey you’ve got to get A’s in all your core courses and electives and all your other things. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to figure that out. It takes more intelligence to figure out that if you do these things well, it will produce that outcome. So that is what we are trying to do. We initiated some testing validations to begin to refine our assessment pool, and of course we plan to continue to refine this assessment pool. So that’s the presentation on product development. I hope I gave you an appreciation on why product development is so important. Two hundred and thirty billion of the economy is going to product development, only 10% succeed, 46% of funds are wasted, and a lot of inventions are really generated by overseas companies investing in the US market. We just simply have to do a better job. And we found factors, which are strong predictors of outcome. Thank you. I will answer any questions.

Dr. Reimann: Those of you are interested in asking questions, please fill out the form and we will read it off. We also talked about some of your background. What do feel that business schools and school faculty to make ready future global talent, to create the generation business leaders sensitive to these kinds of issues through your research and your 30 year career in IBM?