Successes and Challenges in Implementing Lean Product Development

Abstract

Lean thinking is a successful management philosophy that originated in the production dominated mid-20th century. More recently, these principles have been contextualized in a product development setting. However, few companies have successfully adopted lean product development. The gap between the existing knowledge within the academic community and the current practices within the industry motivated an industry-academia research roundtable to identify the successes and challenges in implementing lean product development. This paper shares the successful practices, and the implementation challenges that industry faces in the context of lean product development, which include nomenclature, visual management and metrics, knowledge repository and lean education & training. The paper concludes with a roadmap of research required to enable the adoption of lean product development in the industry.