A Measure of Impact for Platform Changes

In today’s product development environment, most companies develop product platforms rather than individual products due to the time and cost savings that are reaped from subsequent development efforts. Most of the product platform development literature focuses on the development decisions for a product platform while it is under development, which is logically where the biggest benefits would be gained. However when a new market or a new technology arises, firms often struggle to assess these opportunities within the context of their existing product platforms. There is relatively little work that examines the product platform decisions after the platform has been developed and new, unanticipated opportunities are presented to the development organization. The focus of this work is to leverage the existing literature to development an impact assessment process that explicitly accounts for the constraints of a preexisting product platform when considering new technology and/or market opportunities. In this paper, an overview of the overall assessment process is presented. This is followed by the development of the impact metrics and a case study to illustrate the assessment process. The paper concludes with the next step in this work.