The Frontiers of Project Management Research

The third consequence of the ongoing "design revolution" we will discuss is the re-focussing on research and preliminary project design after the focus in the '90s on product development per se (Ciavaldini 1996; Cusumano 1998; Midler 1995; Charue-Duboc 2001). In line with the argument developed in the precedent paragraph, the idea is to develop an innovative "generic solution, proven concepts, platform investments" (Kesseler 1998) or a "semi-product" (Weil 1999; Lemasson and Weil 1999) that will be finalized and incorporated in a family of future product developments.

Managing such projects raises difficult and new problems because of the characteristics of the nature of the target (Lenfle 2000):

• One of the major levels for mobilization in project management is the clear identification of the goal that must be reached at the end of the project. In platform projects, the definition of the result is abstract and fuzzy, compared to the "clear" reality of the launching of a new product. In a way, such a project is by definition not finished. An excessive finalization raises the risk of a very contingent solution, which would be contradictory to the objective of extrapolating the concept to a large range of different products and markets.

• Another difficult problem is the long-term nature of such predevelopment projects. This type of project often faces what we call a "hidden urgency" (Lenfle 2000). The effective commercial launching of derived products is far ahead in time. It is often more than ten years for an innovative component or technology in the car business and more than twelve years for a break-through concept in pharmaceutics. But irreversibility is created long before, at the beginning of the product development where matured solutions are required and the patents obtained.

• The evaluation of importance of such platform projects also suffers a decision-modeling conceptual problem. Their value comes from an option-value reasoning (Kogut 1994), which is less developed and formalized in firms than the classical return on investment for product projects. Many economic works on real option themes insist on the systematic, bias favoring, short-term investment linked to oversimplified financial calculations.

• Last but not least, such projects support a level of risk, which is significantly higher than a product development product. "Properly" closing or radically reorienting an exploration track is important know-how for managing such projects. Never-ending up front exploration is one of the classical burdens of research departments, resulting in a detrimental resource scattering. But the classical myths about project management tend to assimilate a project stop with a failure of the project manager, and then do not encourage such behaviors.