“MANAGING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN 2009"
Thursday December 17, 2009 - Minneapolis
Savvy is a consortium of product development engineering leaders. Savvy offers a timely symposium for product development engineering leaders to address the questions:
How are product development engineering leaders getting their arms around this economic uncertainty? What tools are they implementing? What initiatives do they have underway to:
1. Implement product cost reductions for long-term financial viability.
2. Eliminate waste in order to do meet schedules with fewer resources and constrained budgets.
3. Continuously engage technical knowledge workers to improve their performance quality.
4. Ensure continued flow in the product development pipeline.
5. Implement “Knowledge based” lean product development.
This is a “must attend” symposium for individuals who do want to benchmark the initiatives of others. Leaders know that they cannot engage their people, projects and processes in isolation given the uncertainty.
Plan to get answers and implement useful knowledge about how others address changing management expectations, customer value expectations and simultaneously implement change.
The symposium content will draw on the results of the Savvy Chicago symposium in March.
Savvy Symposium
Thursday December 17, 2009 2:30-5:00 PM
Symposium Cost: $40.00
Register
How We Got Savvy
Jim Jacobs is an experienced new product developer. He spent his first 15 years launching 14 new products in a variety of product/markets working for different corporations. He was mentored by the late John Holahan and Paul Salo at General Mills R&D, Finn Larsen VP –CTO at the Toro Company, Anthony Sabatino VP Engineering at Gould Inc., and Edgar Hetteen inventor of the snowmobile Arctic Cat, Inc. All of Jim’s new product launches except three were successful because of these innovative product development engineering leaders who hired and mentored Jim Jacobs and the development engineers he worked with.
In these organizations, Jim was new product manager whose eleven new product successes were total collaborations with product design engineers such as Dick Ziminski at General Mills, John Berner and Bob Mittelstadt at Toro, Bill Kump and Fred Lee at Gould, Inc. and others. Jim was “joined at the hip” with these excellent engineers as they teamed up to serve their customers and beat their competition with superior new products. Jim contributed by integrating voice of the customer into the work of his collaborating engineers. This integration is similar to the way Toyota’s chief engineers have integrated customer expectations with design capabilities since the late 50s.
Subsequent to his corporate experiences, Jim became a New Product Development Management consultant, assisting product development engineering leaders with voice of the customer research services, NPD process improvement, integrating VOC at the design engineer level, and NPD program leadership improvement.
In early 2003 Jim studied the Toyota Product Innovation, Design and Development System, a successful product development system comprised of people, processes and technology/tools. He assembled product development engineering leaders from a variety of corporations to study and implement the Toyota system as “first adopters.” The leaders became members of a consortium on the basis of their commitment to research the literature, interpret and implement the Toyota Development System as described in the early literature. The name Savvy Consortium was adopted to reflect the experiential knowledge generated. They generate the “savvy,” experiential knowledge, not contained in books, white papers and seminars. Savvy Consortium members also interact with Toyota individuals currently working in Toyota managment or previously employed there.
Savvy Consortium leaders do not hoard their knowledge: they present their experiences at the Savvy full day conferences held semiannually in Chicago (March) and Minneapolis (October).
As a result, the Savvy Consortium is now recognized in North America as the “headwaters” for experiential knowledge that engineering leaders need to learn, adapt and implement the elements of Toyota’s Product Development System.
Knowledge of the principles and pillars of the Toyota Product Development System is needed to integrate customer knowledge, technology, product design and production simultaneously to produce customer satisfying quality new products. The Savvy Consortium offers Conferences, design symposiums, workshops and seminars to generate knowledge needed for continuous improving the people, systems and tools/process in product development.
Beyond product development, Jim Jacobs’ reading interests includes study of early airplane design, technology developments/applications in World War II (both sides). He also studies the transition in aircraft technology design and use in the Korean War conflict.
Jim currently studies “Virtuous Leadership” thinking/practice based on American management ingenuity, Greco Roman philosophy of leadership and the Judeo-Christian “Theology of Work.” Jim synthesize these three sources of knowledge to improve product development leaders’ productivity.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jim received the B. S. in Business Administration from the University of Dayton and was awarded the M. B. A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is Certified by the Product Development and Management Association, New York. Jim and his wife Barbara live in Minneapolis.
Jim Jacobs is cofounder, with the late Butch Quick of 3M, of the Product Development and Management Association, (PDMA) Minnesota chapter, a network of professionals in corporations located in the Upper Midwest.