Presentation
The Concept of Federated Technology Development
Developing a product today is a long and arduous process: Science and technology principles are applied to develop a proof of concept. The concept is engineered into a prototype, a precursor of the final, shipping product. The prototype is then scaled into a manufacturing process to build a product in large quantities. At this point the business and marketing phase begins to place the new product in the home market. A supply chain needs to be built. When a market has been identified for the product, a customer relationship infrastructure is built as well. It is only at this point where considerations for selling the new product in international market begin.

The process for placing a product internationally can be as long as building it in the first place because the steps needed to develop the product in the home market need to be retraced when building an international market. Furthermore, technology developed for the home market may not be a good fit for the target international market and may require further refinement, at additional time and cost.

The traditional way of manufacturing does not take two important factors today into account: the rapid pace of technology adoption and the fact that most economic activity today takes place today through collaborative relationships spanning the globe. Some attempts have been made to speed up the manufacturing processes, such as the just-in-time (JIT) methodologies. The fact remains that technology development is still very much a centralized, serial and monolithic process.

We examine strategies used by companies today to accelerate the development and diffusion of technology, such as the establishment of regional design centers and outright technology purchases by host countries. These strategies have drawbacks that leave much potential for business agility on the table.

A parallel, decentralized approach for technology development is proposed that strives to develop features that address the needs of regional markets from the beginning as a way of eventually shortening the development as well as the delivery pipeline. This is the Federated Technology Development (FTD) approach.

The paper goes through a number of examples that the authors propose as perhaps fortuitous expressions of FTD with an examination of changes in culture and traits in organizations needed to make it happen.

The last section is forward looking, where we attempt to move from serendipitous to predictable results. We analyze processes in the industry occurring today with the goal of attaining the best business outcomes using the FTD principles previously laid out.