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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 important for communicating where the patent fits in the governments' overall taxonomy, which is often used for searching to see if there is prior art that is tangentially related to the new patent being created. The cover page includes the inventor's names, their written abstract defining their invention or the foundation of their patent, and a representative drawing of the patent as well. Often the prior art that the examiner considered is also included as a reference on the front page of the patent as well. The second section is for drawings, and this includes often a series of graphics that seek to explain the functional nature of the patent and define its use in a variety of scenarios. Often drawings also include definitions of