— social media, product development, engaging customers, best practices

Speaker: Tammy Madsen, PhD and Jeanne Bradford, MBA
Meeting Date: Thursday, June 2, 2011
Time: 6.00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm sandwich dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: RAMADA Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale

Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: Applying Social Technology to Product Innovation
Social media has taken businesses by storm, and the next frontier is in its applications to product innovation. 2010 research indicates that only 14% of companies were applying social technologies in the area of product development, however, almost 90% were expecting to increase their use of social tools.

While it may be clear that social product innovation will become the new “normal” for product innovation, many companies are unclear how to get started in engaging customers in a way that will produce the best ideas.

This session shares the best practices uncovered in a recent benchmark study that explored the application of social technologies to the product innovation process. With pragmatic, yet innovative practices, companies of all sizes can begin implementing social technology into their product development processes.   Attendees will learn lessons from those companies that are setting the curve with social technology, how they made their efforts successful, and lessons learned along the way, including:

o Best practices for applying social technology to the product innovation process

o Best practices for applying social technology to the product innovation process

o How do you get started – Big Bang or Pilot?

o Tools & techniques managing both internal and external collaboration

o Resource investment:  how much should you invest and how to get the biggest bang for your buck

o How to deal with intellectual property concerns and get around objections from the C-Suite

Bio:
Tammy Madsen
Tammy L. Madsen (Ph.D., UCLA) is Associate Professor of Strategy and Roelandt’s Fellow in the Management Department at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. Tammy’s research interests are at the intersection of strategy, innovation, competitive dynamics and organizational evolution. Her most recent work explores how innovation contributes to sustaining a profit advantage over that of rivals. Her work has received various awards from the Business Policy & Strategy (BPS) Division of the Academy of Management and appears in a variety of journals including Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Knowledge Management and International Marketing Review.

She serves on the editorial review boards of the Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Science, and is Chair of the BPS Division of the Academy of Management.

Tammy teaches strategy in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at SCU. She also holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (U. of California, Santa Barbara) and a M.S. in Systems Management (U. of Southern California). She began her professional career as a test and evaluation engineer for the weapon control systems on the F14 aircraft. She subsequently worked as a design engineer and program manager at Delco Electronics, General Motors.

Jeanne Bradford
Jeanne Bradford is a business and technology executive with a unique blend of product delivery and organizational transformation skills that help companies innovate, execute and build lasting capability into their organizations.  She has led global organizations to deliver compelling products and technologies for some of the industry’s most successful companies, including Apple, Cisco and AOL.  During her tenure at Apple she led the re-architecture of the Apple new product development process, resulting in a faster and more scalable process to meet the increasing market demand for the Macintosh product lines, and later the iPhone & iPad.
As a results-driven leader, Jeanne has a proven track record in building lean, global teams that deliver high value.  She is also a frequent invited speaker in the area of product development best practices and the emerging use of social technologies for product innovation.

She earned a MBA from Santa Clara University and a BA in mathematics from the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO.