How it Is Changing Patents and Copyrights

¶ … Management and Technology Date (when you are going to hand this in) (1) (a) What are the pros and cons of concurrent product development? (b) Do the pros outweigh the cons? (c) Why or why not? The advantages or pros of the concurrent product development model include faster time to market, increased intensity of focus on communication and clarity of direction, more efficient use of limited resources due to constraints needing to be planned for and met, and often a reliance on advanced rapid prototyping techniques as well (Gehani, 1992).

In larger organizations where there are multiple projects occurring in conjunction with each other, there is often a greater level of orchestration achieved across all projects given how corporate-wide engineering, product development and quality management all must be managed to a common set of objectives (Gehani, 1992). Conversely, the disadvantages include greater potential confusion over roles of critically important departments including engineering, product development and professional services.

What often happens in concurrent product development projects that fail is that the vision and mission often become confused and the many projects being attempted don't get prioritized with the key constraints planned for (Gehani, 1992). Another major challenge of concurrent product development is scope creep and the tendency to underestimate how long the last segment of a project will take to get done. The combination of scope creep and lack of clarity over resource allocations and constraints has made projects nearly 80% complete fail (Gehani, 1992).

Concurrent product development also assumes that the same resources will be available across all supporting functions over time, which often turns out to be an erroneous assumption. As a result, supporting systems and processes cannot often cope with multiple products being launched simultaneously unless an organization has budgeted time and resources will in advance. Despite the many disadvantages of concurrent product development, it is one of the most effective ways to rapidly develop and launch new products, specifically those that are software-based.

Using advanced project management and constraint-based modeling approaches, concurrent engineering can deliver exceptional gains in new product development timeframes and deliver new solutions to customers in a fraction of the time it would take with normal methods (Gehani, 1992). The bottom line is that new product introductions are typically 60% or more of a company's revenues, and the more adept and effective they can become in producing and launching new products using concurrent product development, the more profitable they have the potential to be.

(2) (a) What are the different key parts of a patent? (b) What purpose do they serve? There are four different key parts of a patent. These include the cover page, the drawings, the specifications, and the claims. The cover page is critically.