PDMA Connections - January 2026

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.

Sessions are interactive, engaging, and designed for real-time application, with a maximum of 15 participants to ensure meaningful instruction.

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 session, we’ll explore innovation—specifically, the difference between product innovation and process innovation. We’ll begin 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.

We’ll examine different approaches to understanding requirements and uncovering unarticulated needs—the unknown unknowns that make strong product offerings truly compelling.

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.

PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge 2026 submission portal is now open and ready to receive your innovation ideas!

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.

Recent kHUB Postings:

The kHUB curator team is reaching into our archives and highlighting some interesting, still relevant content.

- In his 2022 viewpoint blog posting “Real” Agile Product Management, guest contributor Robert Webber shares his definition, expectations, and applicability of Agile product managers to your organization. Based on Webber’s definition: “An Agile Product Manager leverages Agile development to increase product development Return on Investment (ROI) by rapidly reacting to new opportunities and threats”, how might this role fit in your innovation process and organization?

- The 2016 posting ‘Breaking Failure’ - Using Analysis and Strategy by Alexander Edsel can be summarized in this way Alexander Edsel argues that businesses rarely plan for or analyze failure—despite high new-product failure rates—and should adopt four proven practices from other fields:

FMEA: Identify all possible failure points, rate their risk, and prioritize fixes.
Root Cause Analysis: Use structured tools (e.g., fault trees) to uncover underlying knowledge or organizational failures, not just surface-level causes.
Early Warning Systems: Track leading indicators, not just lagging metrics like sales, to detect problems early.
Pre-Planned Exit Strategies: Define clear triggers and criteria for when to stop or pivot a failing product.

Together, these methods help companies detect issues sooner, understand why failures occur, and make smarter decisions about continuing or exiting initiatives

- As legacy PLM systems reach the end of their lifecycle, organizations face a critical question: how do you migrate with minimal disruption while unlocking future-ready capabilities? Hear how organizations successfully migrated from their legacy systems to Arena, with insights from a partner who specializes in system migrations. Learn practical strategies and actionable tips to help your teams embrace a modern, scalable platform that supports faster, smarter product development. Watch Upgrade Your PLM, Accelerate Your Innovation: Arena in Action, a recent PDMA Webcast sponsored by Arena to learn more and see practical ways of incorporating AI might help you and your organization.

- We have found and added links to some new Blogs and podcasts to kHUB’s additional resources! Follow articles and insights in Glass Notes. At Faster Glass, “we are fueled by our insatiable curiosity and our desire to propel others by sharing what we've learned. Our posts aim to channel the former to accomplish the latter.” And check out the other blogs and podcasts the kHUB curators recommend.

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:

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 December 2025. We look forward to working with you!

Individual Members
Ihsan Aulia Rahman
Jackie Cohagan
Harmony Crawford
John Davis
Sachin Gadiyar
João Leão
Ashley Pola
Banu Raghuraman
Zoe Reeve
Katelyn Romayor
George Stephen
Eric Yin

Student Members

Yin Ai
Zhihe Cai
Wenyi Li
Shuwei Yi

Academic Member
Rino Andias Anugraha
Poyuan Cheng
Jian Gong
Puwei Peng
Liena Prajogi