The challenge is clear: the life cycles of products and services are becoming increasingly shorter as a result of increasing competition, as well as rapid technological developments.

Unfortunately, our traditional, linear product development processes, are not designed to heed these challenges. This approach, in which new products and services need to run an internal hurdle race in the form of sequential reviews by different business functions, causes delays, a waste of (scarce) resources, and, last but not least, internal rivalry. A rivalry that stems from the fact that the different functions involved in the decision-making process feel they need to prove their added value.

To make matters even more complicated, the competitive landscape is fundamentally shifting: from product development to business model development, and from product portfolio management to business model portfolio management.

In ‘Augmented Collaboration, how teams and AI work together’ Patrick van der Pijl, Patrick Kooij, Alex Knezevic, and Erik van der Pluijm, together with hundreds (!) of co-authors, provide a highly practical (I would almost say ‘hands-on’) guide, on how to successfully address these challenges through a new, customer centric, collaborative, and IT enabled methodology.

I recently had the pleasure of having a conversation with one of the key authors of the book, Patrick van der Pijl, prior to the official release of the book.

In our conversation, we discussed:

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