Crossing innovation and product projects management: A comparative analysis in the automotive industry

Projectification and platform approaches have been two main transformation trends implemented by industrial firms during the 1990s. For those firms, innovation management no longer deals with introducing radically and totally new products, but rather with applying innovative features within a regular stream of products and platforms. This paper proposes an analytical framework that can address the resulting interplay between innovative features and new products. This framework relies on the concept of innovation life-cycle management (ILCM). The paper presents the early results from the comparison of five case studies from three OEMs.