To be competitive on an increasingly competitive global market, companies must be better at quickly developing innovations and new product platforms. Particularly for companies with short product life cycles, it is important to quickly and safely develop new products and new product platforms that fulfill reasonable demands on quality, performance, and cost. Unfortunately, classical methods such as Integrated Product Development (IPD), Concurrent Engineering (CE), and Simultaneous Engineering (SE) were developed for re-engineering of existing products, and have written reports and project reviews at discrete points (at the gates) as feedback principles, which for all types of development means fragmented information, delayed information, and reactive management. Dynamic Product Development (DPD) has a different mindset and is the product concept developed as long as a project runs and not just before engineering starts. Feedback is in DPD based on management participation for immediate and qualitative information, which facilitates control and guidance in real time, reducing unwanted surprises to low levels. Frequent solution iteration (making almost right and quickly testing the solutions) is in DPD important, which is opposite to classical methods. High demands on creativity, development time, usability, cost, and quality have in practical tests shown to be satisfied using DPD. © 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper describes a successful development of a new accessory rain protection for vans for which the principles of Dynamic Product Development (DPD) was used. The development was done and documented during 10 weeks. The result of the project is a prototype model for Opel Combo that unfolds automatically when the doors are opened (see figure 1). The work resulted in a Unigraphic model that makes it possible to easily make rain protections for other types of vans. What characterizes the new rain protection is that it is easy to mount, easy to use, possible to open doors 180° and that it takes a limited space when folded. Due to the materials recommended, it is environmental friendly.

Dynamic systems are systems within which changes occur all the time. Such systems are organisations, innovation projects, etc. It is a well-known fact that interaction and commitment from a range of professions is needed to achieve competitive results in product development projects. Especially when innovative development is carried out, it is of the utmost importance that product developers interact intensively in every link from sub-suppliers to customers, users and society if they are not to lose important signals from any part of the chain or be unaware of important and unforeseen events that will inevitably take place during a development process. Dealing with product development therefore means dealing with complex adaptive systems for which unpredictability increases with the number of people involved and the longer the development process takes. As a consequence, researchers must consider different approaches to research in order to improve their knowledge of practical product development and to produce useful theories for practitioners acting in a dynamic world. This paper deals with such considerations. One conclusion is that the most information-intense situation is reached if researchers act as project leaders of product development projects, which is called performing Participation or Insider Action Research (IAR). This line of action does, however, present a complication in that performing IAR often demands that researchers have some practical industrial experience in advance. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Only by actively taking part inside ongoing processes in organisations for most of the time and occasionally moving out of the system to view it from a distance, and also to compare it with other systems and processes, can the optimal situation arise for a deeper understanding of the complexity of management and teamwork. This view of study and research is the basic principle of Participation (PAR), demanding that researchers act simultaneously as researchers and entrepreneurs, project leaders or team members. PAR is an extension of Action Research, which has mainly been used in social studies during the second part of the 20th century. In this article it is shown (for the first time?) that action research has a strong scientific support in modem science from quantum physics and chaos/complexity theory while in many ways it contradicts the classical (Newtonian) view of how 'good' science should be performed. In this paper a model is shown of how PAR can be used to combine industrial work with university resources in a fruitful way so that scientific findings can also be useful findings for practitioners. Our tests have shown that PAR has revealed important information on change management, project management, innovation management, and the development of (new) user-friendly products. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The role of virtual reality (VR) in the product development process was discussed. It was found that using VR technology, prototypes and products were tested 'virtually' before final verification with physical prototypes. The analysis suggested to perform brain-aided design and pencil-aided design followed by model-aided design (MAD) before VR was used.