"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Product Innovation Toolbox: A Field Guide to Consumer Understanding and Research brings together key thought-leaders and seasoned consumer researchers from corporate R&D, academia and marketing research companies to share their experiences, cutting edge consumer research tools and practical tips for successful and sustainable product innovation. This is an essential resource for product developers, marketers and technologists who want to implement consumer-centric innovation and are responsible for designing product-testing strategies from upfront innovation to support new product development. The scope of the book by chapter shows the steps that transform a consumer researcher to a Consumer Explorer that guides the project team to successful innovation and new product introductions. Product Innovation Toolbox is designed to appeal to broad audiences from consumer researchers, product developers, marketers and executives. With an emphasis on consumer understanding and examples that range from cheese to lipstick and printers to energy beverages, Product Innovation Toolbox offers guidelines and best practices for strategizing, planning and executing studies with confidence and high efficiency yielding faster and better insights.

The Quality Improvement Field Guide: Achieving and Maintaining Value in Your Organization covers the key aspects that quality professionals must know to attain mastery in their field. After reading this book, readers will not only gain an understanding of the key quality improvement concepts, but will gain the practical insight required to implemen

This book of proceedings is the synthesis of all the papers, including keynotes presented during the 20th CIRP Design conference. The book is structured with respect to several topics, in fact the main topics that serve at structuring the program. For each of them, high quality papers are provided. The main topic of the conference was Global Product Development. This includes technical, organizational, informational, theoretical, environmental, performance evaluation, knowledge management, and collaborative aspects. Special sessions were related to innovation, in particular extraction of knowledge from patents.

Using vivid examples, this rigorous but highly accessible guide offers four steps to normalize conflict and channel it to develop breakthrough innovations that are both good for you and your customers. --

The focus of this book is original research regarding the implementation of problem-based learning and pedagogies of play as active approaches to foster self-directed learning. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in mind, educational institutions need to rethink teaching and learning for the future. As such, active engagement can be encouraged, as evident in this book, where problem-based learning drives learning through real-world problems, while pedagogy of play focuses on innovative environments where the action of play and learning are integrated with the aim of developing SDL. The following are addressed in the chapters: an overview of problem-based learning and pedagogy of play, metaliteracy, playful problem-based learning tasks, computational thinking in game-based tasks and geometry, solving puzzles, applying LEGO®, using drama as the pedagogy of play and implementing educational robotics. The empirical research findings disseminated in this book aim to inspire academics in the research focus area of self-directed learning with active learning approaches in the school and tertiary classroom that hold affordances to enhance 21st-century skills. Active learning is an umbrella term for pedagogies that mainstream student engagement, such as problem-based learning, cooperative learning, gamification, role-play and drama. This scholarly book highlights various engaging pedagogies.