Exam questions Flashcards
Identify and briefly describe at least three different types of product development projects.
Different types of product development projects include:
- Fundamentally new products – products that are based on radically different
technology and may address new and for the company unfamiliar market. - New platform projects – the project aims to develop a common platform from
which many derivatives or variants can be developed while main sharing some
common subsystems or technologies. - Derivatives of an existing platform – the development of single product
variants/derivatives from a platform, for example by developing different
performance version of a certain subsystem. - Incremental improvement of an existing product – for example by addressing a
quality issue or improving energy efficiency.
Explain what is meant by an unsupervised learning algorithm in data
science.
Explain with the help of an example what an unsupervised learning
algorithm can be used for in product planning.
Unsupervised learning algorithms take a set of data that contains only inputs, and find structure in the data, like grouping or clustering of data points.
In a dataset, an unsupervised learning algorithm can be used to find clusters in the data.
Example: After applying a clustering algorithm (for example K-means), to the made purchases with customer loyalty cards in a
supermarket, we could identify customer clusters such as, for example,
“vegetarians”, “bargain seekers” or “pensioners” and use that to compile targeted commercial offers, distributed through physical mail, e-mail, sms text messages etc to customers identified as belonging to
the cluster.
Significant changes in direction during the development of a start-up
company are known as “pivots”.
Identify, describe and exemplify at least two types of pivots.
The table below lists and exemplifies some common
types of pivots:
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The list below shows two typical purposes of tools for
communication of customer needs. For each of the purposes, identify at least one suitable tool and
explain how it would provide support for the given purpose.
a) Support to maintain user/customer focus
b) Support idea generation
a) This could be achieved by development of Personas – they identify
typical users, and their main product uses and needs
b) This cand be achieved with the help of Image boards (e.g. Mood boards)
– they provide associations or analogies that may be transferred to a new
context, e.g. from movies (Blade Runner) to automotive design (Tesla
Cybertruck)
Outline the steps of a systematic information search and analysis
process.
For each step, describe how it was carried out in your project.
- Set scope for research
The first step is to establish the context of your search. Research questions may be revised here. You should also have established criteria for when to stop the search . - Plan the search
Planning information search includes: identifying relevant sources/databases, carrying out preliminary searches, formulating search terms,
creating a literature data extraction or similar to store metadata for search results,
establishing a publication folder or similar to store full publications - Carry out the search search the databases by applying the search terms, continually add search results to literature data extraction sheet and to
publication folder - Screen results for relevance and quality, read papers and assess them with regards to relevance and
quality, select papers which are both relevant and of high relevant - Analyze relevant, high-quality publications: categorize the selected papers, read (in detailed way) selected papers, summarize findings in a structured way.
- find answers to your research questions
- identify research gaps
- compile recommendations
- carry out bibliometric analyses
For each of the steps, you are expected to comment on what your team did in
the project. For example: what keywords (examples of), how did you store
found papers, how did you select high quality papers and how were they
analysed
A persona depicts an envisioned (faked) user or customer. What kinds of information are typically included in persona descriptions? Further, identify at least three personas that may be useful for a sewing machine
manufacturer and elaborate a persona description for one of them
Persona descriptions typically include a photo, an
illustrative quote, a background summary with facts
about the user/customer, attributes and list of
customer needs.
Personas relevant for a sewing machine might be
“Malou, sailmaker”, “Larry, dress designer” and
“Ronald, environmental activist”.
Persona should include: background, quote, attributes and customer needs
Imagine that you are working for a manufacturing firm that partly relies on engineering consultants for providing services related to
design, analysis, prototyping & test, project management etc. Identify at least 10 requirements (demands and wishes) that you may use to benchmark alternative suppliers of such services.
Requirements that should posed on the consultant firm could include:
Value proposition:
i.e the consultant’s claim of how its services will benefit (be valuable to you) (wish)
Competence, such as:
- Engineering tool competence, i.e. corresponding to the CAD, CAM, CAE tools that the firm uses (demand)
- Industry competence, related to the firm’s (i.e. automotive, electronics, energy …) (wish)
- Project management competence (competence to take on larger assignments, e.g. involving other consultant firms) (wish)
- Communication competence (to communicate in the preferred language or your organization) (demand)
Facilities and equipment: if the consultancy will provide simulation, prototyping or testing services) (demand)
Resource capability: i.e., number of staff that may be employed to
carry out basic service (demand)
Expert capability: i.e. the number of highly qualified staff that may solve expert assignment (e.g. consultants with PhD degree) (wish)
Flexible availability: e.g, number of staff available at short notice
(wish)
Cost (per hour) (wish)
References/track record (of successful collaboration with our organization) (wish)
Account for in text and graphics for what you
know about the following course learning outcome:
“Identify potential market segments, and screen
and select the most promising market segments for a defined product”
As this question can be answered in many ways, no
single solution is presented.
However, the underlying contents is mainly found
in lectures notes 19
The table below identifies some reasons why product development projects may fail. For each of the reasons, identify a tool (or a combination of tools) introduced in the course that, if applied, may counteract the particular risk for failure and explain how.
a) Nothing new and beneficial is offered by the product
b) Poor timing, the product is launched too late or too early
a) - Benchmarking, quantified comparison with existing design
- Patent analysis, which determines the uniqueness of a technical solution
b) Technology roadmaps, which when in time a particular technology is
expected to be introduced into the market
Explain the meaning of the acronym VRIN and identify the VRIN resources of some company that you admire.
The acronym stands for Valuable – Rare – Inimitable – Non-substitutable.
The terms refers to assets – can be product solutions, production technology, engineering competence that is valuable (adds value or solves a problem for a customer), rare (there are few similar offers in the market), inimitable (difficult or expensive for a competitor to copy) and
non-substitutable (the is no alternative way of solving the same problem).
The VRIN of aeroengine component manufacturer GKN is grounded in their capability for precision manufacturing of large components made from advanced materials. This requires mastery of the use of expensive machinery.
Describe the principles of the method “target costing” and explain how it can be used to set a target product cost in a development process. You can make assumptions concerning numbers if needed for your explanation
The target costing method is based on the idea that in the supply chain from manufacturer to end customer there will be a number of supply chain actors who will add a margin Mi to the cost C, and that those actors and margins are relatively well known in a particular industry (e.g.,
cars of sports equipment). With a known market price P, this enables the backwards computation of a target product cost.
The target cost C is then:
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Some kind of sampling is most often necessary when deciding who should be included in a customer needs study. There are different sampling strategies depending upon the situation. Name and describe briefly maximum three different sampling methods that can be used in a qualitative customer needs study
Sampling strategies suited for qualitative market studies include:
- Theoretical (representative) sampling – participants with a particular property are
selected, e.g. elderly people who are frequent public transport users.
- Critical sampling – participants who are critical are selected, e.g software user how
have logged complaints in a support system. - Lead users – participants who are first or ahead in using the product are selected, e.g
elite athletes for sports equipment.
Imagine that you a product planner for a flashlight company. Your company sells flashlights in different variants aimed at children, regular and professional users. You are currently using LED (light emitting diodes) technology, but you realize that there will be a shift to the currently
more expensive OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology in a few years.
Your task is to draw a product platform plan for your company that accommodates both the
need to maintain and upgrade your current product portfolio and to develop a new generation
of products based on the new technology.
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A bicycle manufacturer is considering the future for bicycles. Today, the products of the firm
represent current state-of-the-art, with personal ownership, lightweight frames electric power
assistance and so on. However, it is worried about the safety hazards associated with bikes.
Now it wants to move into the future with a zero vision for dead or seriously injured bicyclists.
Your task is to identify bicycle functions that need to take significant steps forward in the future
in order to radically improve bicycle safety and to suggests technologies/solutions that may be acquired or developed by the bicycle manufacturer in order to realize those functions.
First you need to consider two basic ways of making vehicles safe:
- Accident (collision) avoidance
- Protecting the cyclist when an accident is unavoidable
You will also need to equip bicycles for monitoring their own status, own traffic actors as well as road conditions, and to process that information in order to guide avoidance and accident avoidance and protection actions.
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Account for in text and graphics for what you know about the following course learning outcome:
“Explain and differentiate between the meaning of key terms such as customer, user, needs, user or engineering requirements, etc., including sub-categories of the terms”.
As this question can be answered in many ways, no single solution is presented. However, the underlying contents is mainly found in lectures notes 3.
