Welcome back. This is our fifth lecture. Today I want to talk about new product development and new product innovation. [BLANK_AUDIO] You recall that in our first lecture I discussed the value life cycle, which is actually the integration of a new product innovation supply chain management. And I mentioned that new product development was, pursued by a group of researchers in supply chain management, was a main topic of OMP pool. So these two topics have been, you know, separate for a long time. Of course, some people try to look at these two topics at the same time. But my main point was that if we truly understand how to improve the performance, the supply chain performance, we have to look at this very close link between new product development and the supply chain management. We also talked about why is it important to know this new product innovation. Because, it is essential condition. It is essential condition for sustainable competitive advantage. If the company fails to develop or introduce new product on a regular basis, or in the, in the most effective way, mm, it cannot, it cannot expect to perform where, perform competitively, competitively for the long term. So I think that, new product innovation is, an essential element of any company's strategy, whether it's in manufacturing or in service. So basically when I talked about this, you know, value life cycle I tried to integrate this new product innovation and supply chain management. In other words, I look at the entire value cycle from new product service development and conception to the end of the life cycle. Or, you know, we can, renew the cycle. And, it is essential in order to make the firm competitive in the market, competitive in the, in the industry. Okay, there is, another contexture in effect, which is that, in 1990s the concept of time-based competition became very well known, very popular. In other words, fast introduction of a new product is important in achieving competitive advance. Time is a very important factor in determining firms competitiveness, that's the main concept of this time-based competition. There are several reasons why, this, you know, time-based competition became you know, widely known in 1990s, or became very important, or gained some attention in the 1990s. Probably before, way before 1990s usually the demand, demand was larger than the supply, which implies that the company can make you know, in many senses in its own way. In other words, if you make things then there is enough. There is a sufficient market demand out there, therefore you don't have to worry about innovating this new product and services too much because demand is always there. But probably around the 1990s, this situation has changed. Maybe it is related to, some globalization and outsourcing and so on and so forth. So large super manufacturing done, you know, and, in more developing countries, rather than developed ones. And therefore, we can see that the supply becomes larger than demand. And therefore, the companies must compete against each other to secure the demand for each product. And that actually engendered much more competition in the market. And these were some of these market context we have to take into account when we try to, you know, realize why this time-based competition became an important concept in, in particular in the 1990s. So time is important factor, that means that when you develop a new product it becomes very important to, to minimize the, you know, project lead-time. In other words, you needed to short, you need to shorten the development time. In engineering side, the concept of concurrent engineering emerged. So concurrent engineering emerged in response to this time-based competition. And there was similar movement in management area, into, you know, management researchers, or managers, or some you know, professors and scholars in the area, tried to respond to this time-based competition. And some of them suggested flexible new product development process which is conceptually similar with concurrent engineering. And also the concept of a cross-functional team became sort of, were, developed as well. It's, it's a closely related to the effects of a new product development process. Both of these trying to minimize the return, but there are more than that. There are more than that. So what I will do now is, I want to put these things as, let's say, flexible, new product development process or I want to say this cross-function team approach. So that's more modern, more contemporary approaches to new product innovation. And after you see there is another extreme. Another extreme is more traditional approach, right? More traditional approach, which is sequence or process, traditional for more sequence or new product development approach. Of course, where there are two extreme approaches to new product development, companies sometimes adopted some in-between mechanisms. Like you know, part of it traditional and the other part a flexible and cross-functional team. And some companies might want this approach so on and so forth. So probably a company uses a mixture of these two approaches. But for the sake of, simplification, for the sake of, learning the principles, I will assume that, there are pure forms of these two extreme approaches, in other words, traditional approach and cross-functional team approach. I want to compare these two processes together, in order to highlight the advantages as well as disadvantages for each one of these approaches. [BLANK_AUDIO]