An Evolved Approach to Advisory Boards in Rare Disease Drug Development: 5-Step Model to Finding and Engaging Patient Advisors

Nearly all new product development teams at pharmaceutical companies will routinely conduct patient advisory boards. These board meetings will help collect and document the experience of patients and caregivers for medical product development and regulatory decision-making. Recently, in June 2020, The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a final guidance on methodological patient-focused drug development (PFDD) to address, in a stepwise manner, how stakeholders (patients, researchers, medical product developers, and others) can successfully use these patient forums. In the process of developing this guidance, the FDA acknowledged that leading its own PFDD meetings, especially when limited to organized disease advocacy groups, cannot address the gaps in information on the patient perspective. So, it has expressed support for advancing the science and utilization of patient input other means. Because traditional methods of conducting patient advisory boards often do not achieve the full potential of patient centricity, the authors of this article share an approach to consider when selecting patient advisors, in order to gain the most actionable input to a product development team.

What's taking so long? A collaborative method of collecting designers’ insight into what factors increase design effort levels in projects

Design effort is a key resource for product design projects. Environments where design effort is scarce, and therefore valuable, include hackathons and other time-limited design challenges. Predicting design effort needs is key to successful project planning; therefore, understanding design effort-influencing factors (objective considerations that are universally accepted to exert influence on a subject, that is, types of phenomena, constraints, characteristics, or stimulus) will aid in planning success, offering an improved organizational understanding of product design, characterizing the design space and providing a perspective to assess project briefs from the outset. This paper presents the Collaborative Factor Identification for Design Effort (CoFIDE) Method based on Hird's (2012) method for developing resource forecasting tools for new product development teams. CoFIDE enables the collection of novel data of, and insight into, the collaborative understanding and perceptions of the most influential factors of design effort levels in design projects and how their behavior changes over the course of design projects. CoFIDE also enables design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators to characterize their creative spaces, to quickly enable mutual understanding, without the need for complex software and large bodies of past project data. This insight offers design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators opportunities to capitalize on positive influences while minimizing negative influences. This paper demonstrates the use of CoFIDE through a case study with a UK-based product design agency, which enabled the design team to identify and model the behavior of four influential factors.

Knowledge Sharing and Co-Opetition: Turning Absorptive Capacity into Effectiveness in Consumer Electronics Industries

Despite the literature regarding the potential effects of absorptive capacity on performance, a problem in the extant literature is that few researchers have reported on how such potential effects could be realized. To resolve the problem, we argued that there are chained mediating relationships among other factors in the absorptive-performance relationship. Data were collected from 522 new product development teams in top 30 consumer electronics manufacturers in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling results revealed that: first, absorptive capacity positively influences team knowledge sharing, which positively influences both cooperation and competition (sharing-stimulated co-opetition), which then lead to increased team effectiveness. This study is among the first to contribute by investigating absorptive capacity’s impact on team-level effectiveness; it achieved this by examining the abovementioned mediating relationships. Practically, we found that absorptive capacity could be influential on team effectiveness, if the team exercise good knowledge sharing activities that in turn stimulate co-opetition relations among workers. Collectively, the dynamics of absorptive capacity, knowledge sharing, and co-opetition can form a positive circle for a team’s sustainable effectiveness.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF PERCEIVED EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ADAPTIVE PERFORMANCE IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

An individual’s adaptability is an important dimension for performing many dynamic tasks. A survey that assessed perceived emotional intelligence and adaptive performance was administered to 257 members of new product development teams in Turkey. A regression analysis revealed that perceived emotional intelligence is related to adaptive performance.

Modeling a cocreative process: The contributions of design and management

This research focuses on the understanding of a team creative process (or co-creative process) by adding design and management inputs to the marketing approach. It proposes and empirically tests a co-creative process based on the three stages of the design thinking method: (1) need definition, (2) idea generation, and (3) solution prototyping. This model also includes the influence of individual variables –empathy, domain-relevant familiarity, and task involvement –at different stages of the co-creative process. The results validate the mediating role of idea generation between need definition and solution prototyping and the influence of the selected individual variables. The predictive validity of the co-creative process has been tested via the evaluation of the solution by experts. Several actions are proposed at each stage of the co-creative process to enable organizations to stimulate the creativity of their new product development teams.