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MONTHLY CONTENT THAT CONNECTS    |   SEPTEMBER 17, 2026

Register Today for the 2026 PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit

This year's Ignite Innovation Summit centers on immersive workshops and practitioner-led keynotes focused on solving real innovation challenges. You’ll collaborate with peers, apply proven frameworks, and leave with tools your team can use immediately. This is where the people behind the most widely used product and innovation methods take the stage—and introduce what’s next.

Join Us in Powering the Future of Product Innovation

PDMA’s 2026 Ignite Innovation Summit brings together product leaders and innovators across industries, creating opportunities for meaningful networking and sharing best practices. Sponsorship ensures strong attendee engagement and elevates your brand throughout the event.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping new product development in two distinct ways. First, AI as a tool is augmenting how PMs work at every stage of the product development lifecycle—from discovery to delivery. Second, AI as a product is fundamentally changing what PMs need to know and what new responsibilities and skills they must develop. Understanding both dimensions is critical for PMs who want to lead effectively in the AI era.

This session presents a comprehensive framework for the AI-Augmented Product Development Lifecycle—a map of how AI transforms each stage of product development. You'll see concrete examples of AI tools and applications at each stage, understand how AI changes the PM's activities and deliverables, and learn what new responsibilities emerge when building AI-first products. We'll then define the AI PM Archetype: the evolved skills, mindset, and competencies required to lead in this new landscape.

The Certificate in Market Research helps you build a strong understanding of market research principles and practices essential to successful product development. Throughout this live virtual masterclass, you’ll learn how to gather and interpret customer and market insights, apply qualitative and quantitative research methods, evaluate customer needs and satisfaction, and use research findings to support smarter product and business decisions. You’ll leave with practical tools, stronger analytical thinking, and the ability to confidently apply market research techniques within your organization.

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

The AI Threshold Project

PDMA Welcomes a New Authorized Training Partner

Recent kHub Postings

Just a reminder that kHUB offers many resources that are free and open to the public. Simply sign in with 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. 

Some kHUB resources are available exclusively to PDMA members, giving members expanded access to PDMA’s growing library of expert-led content. Become a member today!

A number of executives now realize they have lost control of their project portfolio as a strategic, competitive asset. They can no longer answer the basic questions: What stage is this project actually in? Is it ahead of schedule or behind? What is it worth? Does it still have a credible business case, or did that get lost somewhere along the way? In a recent kHUB post, Governance Is Back: How Gated Portfolios Are Reclaiming Control in the AI Era by Michelle Jones of Stage-Gate International and Dr Robert Cooper, the authors explore how AI initiatives exacerbate the situation. They share how utilizing Gated Portfolio governance improves learning with discipline, regularly verifies the business value, and brings leadership back as part of the cross-functional team making decisions together. Learn more by reading the post and/or attending PDMA’s Ignite Innovation Summit Oct. 8–9 in Atlanta.

kHUB editor Kailiang Fu summarizes three TED Talks in his recent Quick Takeaways post, “Why Customers Resist Innovation: Designing for Human Readiness.” As product innovators, we often assume that customers want the newest technology, the most advanced features, and the biggest leap forward. But market research repeatedly shows something different: customers rarely adopt innovation simply because it is better. They adopt innovation when it feels understandable, familiar, and valuable. The challenge for product teams is not just discovering what customers want. It is understanding how much change customers are ready to accept. Successful innovation is rarely about creating the most advanced product possible. It is about creating products that customers can understand, choose, and embrace. Market research plays a critical role in bridging the gap between what is technologically possible and what people are actually ready to adopt. Read his summary and watch the videos on kHUB here.

Today’s product leaders face a new problem. Our innovation environment has changed dramatically: markets move faster, customers provide immediate feedback, AI compresses development cycles, and competitors learn continuously. Yet many companies still govern innovation with decision systems designed for a slower world. The challenge is no longer making perfect investment decisions—it is maximizing learning velocity. Stage-Gate® has helped thousands of firms build better new products for over 40 years by providing a disciplined approach for new product development (NPD). The challenge today is no longer whether to use Stage-Gate, but how to redesign it for continuous learning: adapting its governance to an environment where uncertainty is high, feedback is fast, and the cost of learning has fallen. Witness how AI now enables firms to prototype, simulate, test, and learn dramatically faster, in days rather than months! Facing this new environment, the real question is: how do we redesign decision gates so they enable learning? Read this latest article, New Product Governance in a Time-Compressed World by Dr. Robert Cooper and Dr. Xinjin Zhao. And by the way: Dr. Cooper is the keynote speaker at the next PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit Oct. 8–9 in Atlanta, Georgia. Come hear him talk about this topic of AI and New Product Development in person.

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:

• New Product Governance in a Time-Compressed World

• Material Selection and Requirements in Product Design

• Stage-Gate Agentic: The Coming Revolution in the New Product Process

• The AI Threshold Project

• AI-Powered Stage Gate

• Developing a Product Innovation Strategy

• Adopting Artificial Intelligence for New Product Development: The RAPID process

• Building Sustainability into Your Product Innovation Process

• A Strategy for Adopting AI in NPD

• Managed Instability: Product Innovation in a “Never Normal” World

• Stage-Gate: The “Official” 2026 Version

• TEI 603: Survive the AI Revolution of Product Management

• How to Implement Community-Driven Product Development (CPDP) Without Overhauling Your Process

• Risk-Based Product Design:  Avoiding the Cost of Hidden Assumptions

Along with these still-popular classics

• Steve Jobs: A Product Developer’s Perspective

• From Concept to Market: Inside Food Product Development

• Introduction to Exploratory Product Development

• Find Pearls and Drive More Innovation in Your Portfolio

• A Creative Thinking Process: Problem Abstraction as a Source for Ideation in Product Design

• Managing NPD Project Tradeoffs

Do you have content to contribute? Email it to khub@pdma.org. Visit the home page of PDMA’s kHUB.

Welcome, New Members

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