Lean Product Development Business Game, a Conceptual Work

Developing new products faster than competitors do is a formidable strategic weapon to succeed in increasingly turbulent market. The Toyota way of product development, called lean product development (Lean PD), has been enabling companies to develop products faster and with fewer engineering hours by fostering the real customer value in the design and development process of a product. Among many of the lean PD principles and practices, identifying waste and eliminating them is fundamental step for successful implementation of Lean PD. However, those wastes in product development are tacit and intangible and too hard to identify and stream line a development process. Moreover, the knowledge workers typically involved in product design and development are left unscrutinized about the waste they incur in their work, but the Lean PD thinking enable them to focus on the innovative part of their work by eliminating unnecessary non value adding (NVA) activities. The main objective of this paper is to design a Business Game that will be used to train and experience design experts and students to identify new product development (NPD) wastes and relate the impact of their actions to the development performances using game simulation. The paper is a conceptual framework that only outlines requirements for the game.