V
Value: Any principle to which a person or company adheres with some degree of emotion. It is one of the elements that enter into formulating a strategy.
Value-added: The act or process by which tangible product features or intangible service attributes are bundled, combined or packaged with other features and attributes to create a competitive advantage, reposition a product or increase sales.
Value Analysis: A technique for analyzing systems and designs. Its purpose is to help develop a design that satisfies users by providing the needed user re quirements in sufficient quality at an optimum (minimum) cost.
Value Chain: As a product moves from raw material to finished good delivered to the customer, value is added at each step in the manufacturing and delivery process. The value chain indicates the relative amount of value added at each of these steps.
Value Proposition: A short, clear, and simple statement of how and on what dimensions a product concept will deliver value to prospective customers. The essence of “value” is embedded in the tradeoff between the benefits a customer receives from a new product and the price a customer pays for it. (see Chapter 3 of the PDMA ToolBook 1).
Vertical Integration: A firmís operation across multiple levels of the value chain. In the early 1900ís, Ford Motor Company was extremely vertically integrated, as it owned forests and operated logging and wood finishing and glass-making businesses. They made all of the components that went into automobiles, as well as most of the raw materials used in those components.
Virtual Customer: A set of web-based market research methods for gathering voice-of-the-customer data in all phases of product development (See Dahan and Hauser, JPIM, July 2002).
Virtual Product Development: Paperless product development. All design and analysis is computer-based.
Virtual Reality: Technology that enables a designer or user to “enter” and navigate a computer-generated 3-D environment. Users can change their viewpoint and interact with the objects in the scene in a way that simulates real-world experiences.
Virtual Team: Dispersed teams that communicate and work primarily electronically may be called virtual teams.
Vision: An act of imagining, guided by both foresight and informed discernment, that reveals the possibilities as well as the practical limits in new product development. It depicts the most desirable, future state of a product or organization.
Visionary Companies: Leading innovators in their industries, they rank first or second in market share, profitability, growth, and shareholder performance. A substantial portion (e.g., 30% or more) of their sales are from products introduced in the last three years. Many firms want to benchmark these firms.
Visions: The new product development practitioner-oriented magazine of the PDMA.
Voice of the Customer (VOC): A process for eliciting needs from consumers that uses structured in-depth interviews to lead interviewees through a series of situations in which they have experienced and found solutions to the set of problems being investigated. Needs are obtained through indirect questioning by coming to understand how the consumers found ways to meet their needs, and, more important, why they chose the particular solutions they found. (See Chapter 11 of The PDMA ToolBook 1.)
