Abstract
This report gives an overview of prior art related to lean product development. The overall objective is to use the learning as basis for defining a lean product development model that is applicable to the specific genes, culture, climate and conditions of Norwegian companies. The report covers different aspects related to lean product development, including its relationship to lean manufacturing, descriptions of different models, lean innovation, knowledge-based product development, accelerated product development, lean-inspired tools, business and managerial aspects and methods. The results show that lean product development is much more than product development practice Toyota. Moreover, it is key to understand that lean product development is a total (business) system consisting of a set of company specific principles (building bricks), which cannot be pulled out and implemented one by one. In this system, however, the process of generating, capturing, standardizing, generalizing and reusing knowledge is the ‘mortar’ that keeps the core principles together. Therefore, knowledge is indeed a company asset, similar to financial assets, and knowledge has its own value stream, similar to the product value stream. Lean or, better, knowledge-based product development has to be practiced across the entire business/company. The present report gives an introduction of various aspects associated with knowledge- based product development. Finally, a pathway to further model development and company assessment along with some thoughts on implementation practice are outlined