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Research Clusters
NPDS_Lab research cuts across the strategy and management of innovation, drawing on engineering, artificial intelligence, and organizational theory. The lab's work spans the full product development lifecycle, from early stage opportunity identification to post-launch scaling and governance, and engages with the technological, organizational, and competitive forces that determine how new products reach the market.
Cluster 1: Product Strategy and Innovation Processes
The lab studies how organizations manage innovation from idea to market: product strategy and portfolio management, user needs discovery and problem framing, ideation and concept selection, and the design of development processes such as agile and stage-gate models. Work in this cluster also covers pricing, business model design, platform and ecosystem strategies, and governance mechanisms that allow firms to balance exploration with exploitation.
Cluster 2: Emerging Technologies in Product Development
This cluster focuses on technologies and methods that are changing how products are designed and manufactured. On the additive manufacturing side, the lab examines the implications for prototyping cycles, customization, design constraints, supply chains, and the economics of small-batch production. On the digital twin side, the focus is on model-based engineering, simulation-driven design, and virtual testing as tools for faster iteration and earlier risk identification.
Cluster 3: Security and Protection in Distributed Innovation
Innovation increasingly takes place across distributed, digital environments, and doing so introduces security risks: cybersecurity threats, spoofing, and counterfeiting during the NPD process, and leakage of industrial secrets. The lab studies secure-by-design principles, the protection of design files and product data across internal teams and external partners, governance of access to prototypes and digital models, and the trade-offs between openness, speed, and protection in collaborative settings such as open innovation.
Cluster 4: AI-Enabled Innovation and Product Development
The lab studies how artificial intelligence, both generative and non-generative, supports the product development process. Current work spans AI-assisted opportunity identification, user insight extraction, concept generation, design space exploration, automated testing, and the development of software-enabled product features. It also examines the organizational and strategic implications of embedding AI capabilities into both the development process and the products that emerge from it.
Cluster 5: Sustainability, Regulation, and Global Development
This cluster examines how sustainability requirements, regulatory strategies, and global development dynamics shape product decisions, from lifecycle thinking and compliance pathways to the organizational challenges of coordinating distributed teams across geographies and institutional contexts.
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