How to learn about the future

Summary form only given. New product development (NPD) must have two essential goals, which are, in turn, complementary: obtaining a profitable innovation for the firm; and increasing the organization´s technological capabilities and knowledge of R&D project management. The first objective is attained when the company is able to develop a new quality product in the shortest possible time and at a reasonable cost. However, the second aim is only feasible when the organization is able to develop a process enabling it to learn from its past successes and failures, and communicate this experience to all the agents participating in future projects. Taking into account the great importance of the comprehension and transmission of this internally generated knowledge for the company, this paper aims to propose a model allowing the organization to learn about the future. The use of system dynamics in building this model allows not only the development of a generic model capable of revealing causal explanations for empirically detected facts but also adapts this model to each specific project made by the company. This adapted model will be able to provide the firm with a tool for analyzing, valuing and even quantifying-a priori-the effect-that the policies and decisions adopted is going to have on the evolution of the project. In this way, it is possible to anticipate-before the application of these policies in the real system-the scope of their consequences and thus prevent the implementation of those policies that have proved to be destabilizing. In this way, a learning laboratory is set up.