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Thursday, December 18, 2025
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Certificate in Innovation Strategy: A Live Virtual Masterclass
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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.
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Community-Driven Insights: Job Task Analysis Update
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PDMA recently concluded a comprehensive Job Task Analysis (JTA) to ensure our programs remain aligned with the realities of today’s product development, product management, and innovation roles. This effort was made possible by the dedication of our global community: hundreds of professionals who completed the survey and a dedicated panel of expert volunteers who met in person in Chicago in August to define the critical job tasks that formed the foundation of the survey. Following survey completion, PDMA convened a reconciliation meeting to validate results and address feedback, and we are now in the final stage of formalizing the outcomes. This work reinforces PDMA’s role as a thought leader, using rigorous, data-driven insights to continuously evolve our
certifications and professional development offerings. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed their time and expertise to advancing the profession.
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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.
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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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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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Recent kHUB Postings:
The kHUB curator team is reaching into our archives and highlighting some interesting, still relevant content. The 2020 posting How the Landscape of Market Research Is Changing Faster, Better Insights with AI can be summarized in this way: Machine learning is transforming market research by quickly extracting deep customer insights from user-generated content such as reviews, social media posts, and call transcripts. It is faster, cheaper, more objective, and more comprehensive than traditional methods, allowing researchers to uncover overlooked or low-frequency “needle in the haystack” insights without collecting new data. AMS and MIT developed the ACE™ machine-learning tool, which uses neural networks to identify detailed customer needs that often match—and exceed—findings from traditional qualitative research. Companies across many categories have used this
approach to generate complete insight databases in weeks. A blender case study, for example, revealed 97 actionable consumer needs across 34 topics, achieved at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research. Machine learning also links insights to customer quotes and supports sentiment analysis, enriching understanding and helping teams identify high-impact opportunities for innovation.
We have found and added links to some new Blogs
and podcasts to kHUB’s additional resources! Follow articles and insights from The Product School:
- The Product Podcast – Tune in to The Product Podcast featuring insights from AI product leaders at top tech companies. Unveiling actionable frameworks, unconventional best practices, and real-world examples, the show goes deeper into how AI is redefining product
strategy, experimentation, and growth. This is where the future of product and AI takes shape—through the voices of those leading the transformation.
- The Product Management Blog – Gain insights from top Product Leaders to boost your career and grow your
business.
- And check out the other blogs and podcasts the kHUB curators recommend.
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 TED Talks – Strategy, we share links to three TED talks related to Strategy, including a brief summary and practitioner points.
A reminder that kHUB links to JPIM’s Academic articles! This allows you to access the abstracts and practitioner points on kHUB before delving into the full article in JPIM—PDMA’s peer reviewed Journal of Product Innovation Management. Check out these recent article abstracts posted in kHUB’s Product Innovation Management Section:
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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21 January 2026
PDMA DACH: Chapter Relaunch & Presentation
February 18, 2026PDMA Minnesota: Curious, Empathetic and Fearless: The PM Toolkit That Works in Any Industry Learn more and registerMarch 12, 2026PDMA Carolinas: Truth in Action: Nurturing Harmony in the Workplace Learn more and register
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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 November 2025. We look forward to working with you!
Individual Members Binoy Balan Joe DeLuca Cassidy Edstrom Kailiang Fu Sahit Chowdary Garapati Kimberly Gillis Jean-Pierre Grillo Dean Hornsby James Knupfer Priyanka Malla Ngozi Gloria Okosun Pawankumar Suresh Henry Uwabor Robb Waldner
Student Members
Rafael Camus Xinjie Hu Benson Uche
Academic Member Yiming Shen
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PDMA congratulates newly certified NPDPs in November 2025!
Newly Certified NPDPs
Hanlin Gu Zhitao Huang
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The JPIM January 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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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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