"Lean Thinking" has dominated product development and project management for over a decade. Now, however, a six-year study by MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program led by Michael Cusumano and Kentaro Nobeoka finds that, in order to dramatically improve product portfolios, Toyota and other leading companies are moving beyond single-project management on which lean thinking is based. In Thinking Beyond Lean, Cusumano and Nobeoka show that single-project management can produce isolated hit products and "fat" designs that contain few common components and many unnecessary parts and...

The advancementof the softwareindustry has hada substantialimpact notonly onproductivityandonGDPgrowthglobally, butalsoonourdailyworkandlife. Software business refers to commercial activity of the software industry, aimed at generating income from delivery of software products and software services. Although software business shares common features with other international knowledge-intensive businesses, it carries many inherent features making it an intriguing and challenging domain for research. Until now, however, software business has received little attention from the academic community....