Ask almost anyone in a new product development function and they’ll tell you they’ve had experience with what I call a “staged approval system” model. For those who haven’t dealt withstaged approval systems, they are, as the name implies, models that break up the...

So how do you develop relationships with your customers – or what I call “conduits of connectivity?” There’s an old management theory which was propagated back in the 1970s called “management by walking about,” or “MBWA.” The idea there was that, as you walked around the...