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Thursday, February 19, 2026
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Stacy Heuer,
St. Louis Chapter Secretary/Treasurer
"Stacy has demonstrated exceptional commitment and consistency in supporting the PDMA St. Louis Chapter. She has successfully ensured that our monthly chapter meetings are conducted without interruption, maintaining a disciplined cadence and strong operational continuity. Stacy regularly communicates with the board by sharing meeting notes, tracking updates and blockers, and reinforcing accountability across the team. In addition to these responsibilities, Stacy has effectively managed both the Secretary and Treasurer roles with a high standard of governance and professionalism. She has established and maintained a centralized, well-organized, and transparent document management process that has significantly improved operational clarity and continuity for the chapter. Stacy is a quiet but indispensable pillar of strength for the St. Louis Chapter. Even after retiring from her professional career, she has continued to dedicate her time, energy, and expertise to PDMA, exemplifying true volunteer leadership. This moment presents an ideal opportunity to recognize her sustained contributions and to celebrate the meaningful impact she has had on our chapter’s success."
- Nishant Parikh, St. Louis Chapter president
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Certificate in Innovation Strategy: A Live Virtual Masterclass
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Final opportunity to join the upcoming Innovation Strategy Certificate cohort!
The Certificate in Innovation Strategy helps you build a strong understanding of strategic principles in business and innovation. Throughout this live virtual masterclass, you’ll learn how to assess the internal and external business environment to identify innovation opportunities with confidence, develop strategies that drive long-term success, and to align innovation efforts with organizational goals. You’ll leave with practical tools, clearer strategic thinking, and the ability to make smarter decisions that move your organization forward.
Seats are limited. Don’t miss this chance to elevate your strategic thinking and innovate with confidence.
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Product teams often say they are customer-centric, yet still default to feature-led VOC. Watts (a US-based global water technology company) and market research partner Phase 5 took a different path. By redesigning their learning approach and using structured, bias-resistant interviews, the team uncovered two critical but under-articulated field problems in a mature, “unglamorous” product category―problems that engineers, contractors, and facility managers had been quietly working around for years.
These insights did more than validate assumptions; they fundamentally reshaped product development and provided a clear, defensible direction for a new solution now heading to market.
In this session, we’ll walk through how reframing the inquiry, surfacing “hidden in plain sight” product issues, and resisting internal bias led to a market-ready concept with strong organizational confidence behind it.
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Join PDMA for a FREE webcast with Scott Burleson, Chief Product Officer at The AIM Institute.
Most teams don’t suffer from a lack of data. They suffer from a lack of clarity. Product roadmaps stall. Research gets debated instead of used. Strategy decks multiply, but confidence doesn’t. And AI promises speed—while quietly amplifying whatever confusion already exists. The root problem is almost always the same: poor inputs. When teams don’t share a clear, structured understanding of what customers are actually trying to accomplish, every downstream decision—prioritization, messaging, innovation, investment—gets noisier, slower, and riskier. In
this webcast, we’ll explore the return on clarity: how improving the inputs to your product, marketing, and innovation decisions changes everything that follows.
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Deadline Extended!
Nominations are
now open through February 27 for the 2026 PDMA OCI Award!
Do you know an organization—perhaps yours—that has distinguished itself by its ability to consistently identify, develop, and launch breakthrough innovations and best practices? If so, please take a few minutes to complete the nomination form. You can also learn more about OCI on the PDMA website.
The deadline for nominations is February 27, 2026.
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PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge 2026 Submission Portal Is Open
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The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is pleased to offer the 7th annual Global Student Innovation Challenge. This challenge encourages and supports students developing novel, real-world offerings—including products, software, or services. Students currently enrolled full-time at a university academic program, either in an undergraduate or graduate level, are eligible to participate. You can review the rules and guidelines of the challenge, as well as videos of the winning teams from previous years, on our website. Please thoroughly review the rubric to ensure you meet all the criteria.
The submission portal is now accepting applications with a deadline of June 1, 2026.
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PDMA Welcomes a New Authorized Training Partner!
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PDMA is proud to welcome PDC Group as an Authorized Training Partner (ATP)! ATPs deliver high-quality NPDP certification preparation and product management training using PDMA’s official materials. Join us in welcoming PDC Group to the PDMA community and explore how their programs can support your professional development.
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Recent kHUB Postings:
- Product innovation is
tough. If you’re a follower trying to close the gap, how do you keep pace with your competition? If you’re the market leader, how do you stay ahead of the market? And if you want to create the market, how do you uncover the next unanticipated product? In this recent webinar Crowd vs Expert Product Discovery and Ideation, presenter Dave Sharrock explores innovation—specifically, the difference between product innovation and process innovation. He begins with ideas around product
ideation and discovery, challenging ourselves to think about where great ideas come from: what we can learn from experts and what we can learn from crowds. He examines different approaches to understanding requirements and uncovering unarticulated needs—the unknown unknowns that make strong product offerings truly compelling.
- TED Talks! – most people are aware of the genre and have their favorites. In an effort to provide pertinent innovation information in shorter bites of content, the kHUB curators have looked into the TED Talk archives to recommend some related to innovation. In this viewpoint blog post by kHUB editor Rose Klimovich, TED Talks on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Future of Business, we share links to four TED talks related to Strategy and AI, including a brief summary and practitioner points
of each.
- Guest contributor Dr. Robert Cooper explains in his recent kHUB article “Stage-Gate Agentic: The Coming Revolution in the New Product Process” how the future of NPD is a partnership between humans and AI agents. AI systems perform
information-intensive tasks—research, analysis, simulation, and integration—while humans provide strategic vision, contextual insight, and final accountability. Stage-Gate Agentic provides a framework for harnessing this partnership, enabling faster, more efficient, and more competitive innovation in an AI-driven era.
- The kHUB curator team is reaching into our archives and highlighting some interesting, still relevant content.
- The 2016 posting Integrated Product Portfolio and Project Management: The Art of New Product Demand Planning argues that companies gain significant competitive advantage when Product Portfolio and Project Management are tightly integrated with Integrated Business Planning (IBP), particularly through a disciplined linkage between new product decisions and the Demand Plan. Effective integration requires accepting ambiguity in long-range planning, explicitly modeling both the consequences and upside of new product decisions, and ensuring cross-functional alignment among product management, demand planning, supply, sales, marketing, and finance. Best-in-class companies document assumptions, track launch performance realistically, and adjust demand plans when projects are delayed, accelerated, added, or canceled. By embedding new product demand into IBP through a robust NPMP, leadership gains transparency into trade-offs, can make informed strategic decisions, and fosters a collaborative planning culture—ultimately enabling sustainable growth, better
resource allocation, and stronger execution against strategic goals.
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Norbert Majerus shared in his 2021 article “Winning Innovation” that the right innovation—the right product at the right time in the right place—has a huge impact on a company’s top and bottom lines, often much larger than companies think will occur. Read the steps your R&D organization should take to deliver what is needed to grow companies into winners in their industry.
kHUB Most Popular Content:
See what your competitors and peers have viewed in kHUB recently. The following content is among the most accessed last month:
Along with these still-popular classics:
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kHUB Access
Just a reminder that access to kHUB is free and open to the public. Simply sign into your PDMA account and start searching for relevant topics, blog posts, articles, webcasts, and more—to explore and gain knowledge on various Product and Innovation topics.
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Whether you have an hour a month or can commit to a larger role, your contributions will make a significant impact on our community. Ready to Get Started? Visit our volunteer webpage to learn more and sign up today.
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PDMA is growing! Meet and connect with our new members by signing into the PDMA community on our website.
PDMA welcomed these new members in January 2026. We look forward to working with you!
Individual Members
Elizabeth Belmont
Violetta Blokhina
Sourabh Bodkhe
Sheila Cosgrove
Dominick DeStasio
Craig Drinkhall
Anshul Garg
Edugie Irivbogbe
Nikhil Jain
Yu Liu
Meghana Makhija
Jim Markunas
Natalija McClelland
Kelly Murt
Austin Nadin
Shannon Proctor
Bharti Rupani
Michael Sproles
Rajesh Telikicherla
Student Members
Erin Choudhari
Teng Huang
Richard Spalding
Jan Suprun
Academic Member
YiDong Gong
Xiaolei Guo
Juanyou Huang
Hua Teng
Yaoqi Wang
Qi Zhang
Corporate Team Member
Hemant Jatla
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PDMA congratulates newly certified NPDPs in January 2026!
Newly Certified NPDPs
Chengxi Li
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The JPIM March 2026 issue is now available!
Access the latest issue here.
Members, log in and access JPIM articles here. Non-members may access abstracts. Hard copy subscriptions for members can be purchased here.
Don't forget to download the JPIM
app!JPIM app for iOS and Android devices is available from the App Store or Google Play to read all of the issues and articles awaiting publication under "Early View." Search for Journal of Product Innovation Management.
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Carolinas Chapter Student Innovation Competition
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Connect with PDMA on social media
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PDMA, 1601 Utica Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55416-3400, United States
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