Product development as a structured and interactive network of knowledge-a revolutionary approach

TLDR

Product development education in European universities is often delivered by professors returning from industry, who face time constraints and lack curriculum‑development opportunities, leading to rushed, provisional teaching and limited career longevity. The paper proposes a novel method for standardising, structuring, and linking product‑development knowledge. It introduces the “Key to Innovation” system, which standardises, structures, and interconnects product‑development knowledge to support teaching, learning, training, and product creation. The Key to Innovation system enables higher‑quality teaching, learning, training, and product development.

Abstract

Product development, especially in European universities, is taught mostly by professors who later return to university after some years of gathering experiences in leading positions in industry. Changing from industry to university, they have to prepare lectures in a short time which causes insufficient approaches with provisional scripts and frantic activities. Additionally, these young professors do not have chance to develop a well-founded curriculum due to huge complexity and dynamic of research area. Even if they finally succeed on a high teaching level, quite often their active time has diminished and they retire. The following paper shows a new approach of standardising, structuring, and linking knowledge in product development. This system called the key to innovation will give opportunity to develop a new quality of teaching, learning, training and product development itself.