An Agenda for Future Research on IT and Product Development - Information Technology and Product Development - page 187

The third issue relates to the support IT can provide to integrating the exter-
nal innovation opportunities with the company's internal innovation engine .Itis
quite evident that to be successful companies will need to integrate their inter-
nal and external innovation activities. Future studies may focus on identifying the
organizational mechanisms that would facilitate such integration and how such
organizational mechanisms may be combined with the IT infrastructure to bring
a high level of coherence between the company's innovation activities and that of
its network partners.
Overall, network-centric innovation context provides a fertile ground for future
research and the insights from such studies would likely become very valuable
as more and more companies make the shift toward such collaborative innovation
practices.
10.2.2 Product Life Cycle Management and Portfolio
Management
A topic of considerable contemporary interest to both researchers and practition-
ers in the innovation management area is product life cycle management (PLM).
As noted in two of the chapters in this topic, the emphasis on PLM as a busi-
ness concept has been driven by a host of internal and external factors. On the
one hand, the need to accelerate innovation and become more efficient in prod-
uct development has enhanced the importance of more mature product development
and maintenance processes. At the same time, external factors such as globaliza-
tion, product and technology complexity, and shrinking product life cycle have
emphasized the need to adopt a broader product platform approach that could facil-
itate sharing of product components or modules as well as technologies across the
enterprise.
In the 1990s and the early part of this decade, much of the focus of corpo-
rate IT departments has been on implementing ERP and CRM solutions. With the
widespread deployment of these enterprise applications, many companies have real-
ized that there is a critical gap in their corporate data model related to product
and product development. It is true that some of the companies have imple-
mented product data management (PDM) solutions in the 1980s. However, the
functionalities provided by PDM systems are limited to design and manufactur-
ing engineers, and further, they offer limited connectivity with other enterprise data.
More importantly, PDM solutions have traditionally not been very user friendly and
consequently, PDM adoption has been restricted to a few large engineering-oriented
companies.
PLM solutions extend the functionalities of PDM systems to marketing, finance,
and product support areas and enable companies to achieve seamless integration of
all their product life cycle activities (from the design and development of products
to their support and eventual retirement) with other enterprise processes such as
customer relationship management, inventory management, and procurement.