PDMA Connections - March 2025

We invite you to become a key sponsor of the PDMA 2025 Ignite Innovation Summit, taking place September 13–16, 2025, at the Marriott Marquis Chicago. As a sponsor, your organization will connect with top product leaders, executives, and innovators from diverse industries, positioning your brand at the forefront of cutting-edge product development and management.

Our sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities are designed to maximize attendee engagement with your company, ensuring your brand is prominently featured throughout the event. Secure your sponsorship today and be part of an event that shapes the future of product development and management!

The 2025 JPIM Annual Research Forum, powered by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), seeks various types of conference submissions from scholars from all disciplines who share a common interest in new product development and innovation management research. The JPIM Research Forum is part of the PDMA Summit and will offer networking opportunities with scholars, practitioners, the JPIM’s Editorial Team, and the PDMA community. There will be joint sessions for researchers and practitioners for stimulating high-impact research driven by collaborations between industry and academia.

Full Competitive Papers, Developmental Papers, and Special Session Proposals are all welcome. Submissions from all academic areas, methodological approaches, and regions of the world are welcome.

Submission Deadline: April 15, 2025
Notification to Authors (Acceptance/Rejection decisions): July 15, 2025
2025 Submission Website

PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge 2025 submission portal is now open and ready to receive your innovation ideas!

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is pleased to offer the 6th 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. The top three finalist teams will be invited to present their projects as part of the PDMA International Inspire Innovation Conference, September 13-16, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. 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, 2025.

Recent kHUB Postings:

Guest contributor Dr. Robert Cooper’s latest article AI-PRISM: A New Lens for Predicting New Product Success, presents the data, tool, and a model to evaluate project success using AI. The AI-driven PRISM model has demonstrated reliability and validity in predicting the success of New Product (NP) projects. Cooper recommends that product teams use AI-PRISM as a self-assessment tool to gain a more realistic evaluation of their projects, helping to identify strengths and weaknesses. Management should integrate AI-PRISM into go/no-go decision-making meetings as an additional evaluator to provide valuable insights during critical project decisions. Multiple evaluations per project should be conducted to ensure accuracy, but human oversight should remain in place to guide the decision process. For product management teams, Dr. Cooper recommends that it's time to embrace AI-driven decision-making by incorporating AI-PRISM into your project evaluation process. Start by using it as a self-assessment tool for your projects to gain objective insights. Then, integrate AI-PRISM into your decision-making framework to enhance the go/no-go process, ensuring that every project has a reliable, data-backed evaluation before moving forward. Combine AI’s predictive power with your team’s expertise to make more informed, confident decisions and drive successful product outcomes.
Why do so many product teams fail to anticipate customer dissatisfaction? Community engagement goes beyond forums and meetups; it’s about connecting customers with internal teams to ensure products meet real needs. In Jake McKee’s most recent kHUB article, Breaking the Black Box: How Community-Driven Product Development Prevents Product Flops, he provides insights on how to engage with customers continuously throughout the development process. Jake encourages teams to change the way they engage and understand customers during development, not just before or after.
Ready to rethink your approach to product development? Watch this insightful webcast and discover how empathy can be the game-changer in creating products that truly resonate with users. In his recent webcast, Developing Obsession-Worthy Hardware, Gustavo Soares explores the vital role empathy plays in creating products that capture attention and foster deep customer loyalty. By cultivating deep, "bone-level" empathy, teams can approach design with a clear, focused direction—what he calls a "true north star." Empathy isn't just a feel-good concept; it’s a powerful strategic tool that empowers managers to make faster, more independent decisions. Soares highlights best practices and case studies from Disney and Alienware to show how empathy-driven product development leads to user-friendly, market-ready products.
For most companies, one of the most important and uncertain tipping points in a product life cycle is the transition from business strategy to product requirements. Purposeful NPD: Designing Your Product Strategy—a recent webcast presented by John Eaton—shares how to leverage Design Thinking as a key element of product strategy to drive innovation and improve overall new product development. After all, leadership's key role and responsibility to guide the organization is to articulate a destination, estimate the cost and time for the best path to get there, and provide enough evidence to stakeholders that it's worth the journey. On the other hand, Product Managers are typically put in charge of logistics: Balance the needs and journey of the end user, identify the role of the customer or brokers in the middle, navigate the competitive landscape, assess the technical lift for the team, etc. It’s at this juncture that PMs lead the trade-offs between desirability, feasibility and viability, and comprehend how the cumulative effects of design, engineering, manufacturing, and sales will ultimately make their product’s path to market a success.
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 article abstracts and practitioner points from the January 2025 issue posted on kHUB:

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 February 2025. We look forward to working with you!

Individual Members

Keyuri Anand
Lou Bojarski
Hardik Chawla
Anita Duenas
Sharysse Frasco
Dawn Gibson
Paula Gray
Goran Kanceljak
Rob Lewis
Naga Srirama
Narasimha Raviteja
Malladi
Amber May
Ash McGregor
Rochelle Nakhid
Shubhanshu Pandey
Latha Ramamoorthy
Ashay Satav
Jeremy Shields
Leonardo Souza
Raymond Steadman
Mark Whiteside

Student Members
Saif Abbas
Ayesha Kauser
Danielle Stewart
Ioannis Voulgaris

Academic Members
Lin Pan
Alicia Parker
Halyna Tsehelyk

Calling all student Innovators in the Carolinas! We are excited to announce our 2025 student innovation competition. The competition offers you an opportunity to showcase your ideas and business acumen, network with business leaders, and win cash prizes! Plus, by participating, you can set yourself up for great career opportunities with an experience that will jump off your résumé and set you apart from the crowd.

Save the date to hear keynote speaker Ty Hagler and the some of the best next generation of innovators in the Carolinas present their ideas.

The showcase will be held on Friday, April 18 at Noon EDT.

Learn more and register

Know a product, software, or system that exemplifies user-centered design excellence? Nominate it for the prestigious 24th Annual Stanley Caplan User-Centered Design Award! Winners receive a trophy, a $1,000 honorarium, and industry recognition through HFES promotions and Ergonomics in Design. Open to physical products, software, and systems in use within the past three years, nominations are accepted from individuals or teams. Submit your Nomination Form here by April 30 (optional early feedback by April 1). Interested in judging or volunteering? Get involved here or learn more at www.ucdAward.com. Let’s celebrate innovation that puts users first!