PDMA Connections - December 2024

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 project 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:

- Several ideation tools and methods are available to product and service designers and design teams. This article (A Creative Thinking Process: Problem Abstraction as a Source for Ideation in Product Design) by kHUB content editor Carlos Rodriguez presents and discusses the concept of Abstraction as a mental operation leading to the highest level of innovation. Inversion and abstract laddering, two essential techniques, are described and examples shared. Inversion involves the opposite or negative things to the problem at hand; you consider the opposite of what you want. Abstract laddering aims to understand the problem or concept by exploring the idea concept through concrete, intermediate, and abstract levels. The process reaches the identification of core principles that provoke broader insights when facing a design challenge. Learn more about these ideation design tools by reading the full article in the Product Development & Design Tools section of kHUB.

- Dr. Robert Cooper shares more information about AI adoption as part of the new product development process in two recent postings:

Listen in on a conversation with Bob Cooper (founder of Stage-Gate) and Paul Heller of Sopheon in a podcast, “How Do We Move Forward Deploying AI for New Product Development with Bob Cooper”. They delve into the value of deploying AI in new product development. AI has been defined as a very cost effective and very effective prediction machine. Used in innovation, AI is best utilized to predict behaviors and outcomes. AI can be used in both the product side and the process side of innovation. AI can be used as part of the new product, improving the product’s productivity and effectiveness, depending on the product and industry. And almost any industry can easily adopt AI as part of their innovation process to improve development productivity. Listen to the full podcast to gain insights to utilizing AI in new product development and innovation.
Check out Dr. Cooper’s latest article, where he shares data about NPD AI adoption around the world and suggests ways for your organization to not be left behind in The Coming AI Tsunami in New Product Development – Are You Ready?.

- Guest contributor Diana Stepner recently shared an article “Ten Tips to Create a Product Community of Practice” on the concept and value of Communities in Practice and how they can be used to foster growth, innovation, and empathy within product organizations. The key to success is applying agile principles, building buy-in from the start, and using a co-creation approach that encourages participation and engagement from all members. The bottom line: As Product people, we cannot stand still. Technology and the world around us continue to evolve, and so must we or we face becoming irrelevant. The same applies to companies. Read the full article in kHUB’s Culture & Teams section.

- 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 posted in kHUB:

kHUB Most Popular Content:

See what your competitors and peers have viewed in kHUB recently. The following recent 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 November 2024. We look forward to working with you!

Individual Members

Fahad Alharbi
Peter Anderson
Tyler Batten
Jim Booth
Natalia Ciesla
Meghan Glass
Kelli Harper
Shivanand Koppalkar
Chris Lidberg
Heather Miller
Oluyinka Oginni
Jessica Osborn
Neha Singh Rajpurohit
Dena Taub
Ahmad Zabadi

Student Members
Wei Hung Chen
Karl Colimon
Nile Greer
Srinivas Guntapalli
Ravindranath
Liuxu Yang
Junwen Zhang

Academic Members
Duong Hoang Tien
Asvin Shanmugam
Cheng Yao
Qin Yi