HBR article Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

HBR article - Coursework Example In this way, much of the waste in time and money that is often associated with new product development is ameliorated. The article goes on to detail how Eli Lilly created a special team which was named â€Å"Chorus† whose sole purpose was to guide and direct research and development of new product lines based up on the metrics that have been previously related. Due to a strict adherence to the previous rubric, Eli Lilly was able to nearly double the amount of drug compounds that they developed between both 12 and 24 month periods. The article continues to describe the pitfalls that not employing such logic can provide to the overall process. Furthermore, the authors detail the situation that often arises where key leaders and shareholders ignore the obvious signs that a product line displays during development regarding its ability to succeed in the marketplace and yield a profit. Oftentimes, this is the result of the fact that management and/or key leaders have strong beliefs with respect to the overall viability of a given product and are therefore reticent to accept any proof that the line may result in eventual failure. Specific examples of such blind faith are given by the authors with relation to Ely Lilly’s drug tests that continued to send red flags to the development team; however, management continued to pour money down the rabbit hole with respect to continuing to fund the research. The authors discuss a secondary pitfall that many would-be product development teams suffer from. This secondary pitfall centers upon the fact that many product development teams terminate projects/products prematurely due to lack of evidence that the project/product has an overall likelihood to succeed. Although this can result from a number of factors, the authors note that the main reason results from an unclear and undifferentiated research process. For purposes of the analysis, the authors define one of the key components of success to relate to the con cept of POC (Proof of Concept). This relates the process that a firm can employ that provides a highly focused fast track path of research to determine whether or not the product has likelihood of overall success. In this way, targeted experiments can be rapidly employed to prove whether or not a product has an overall likelihood of success. Likewise, the authors note that determining overall project/product profitability is also a likely determinate that should be used in order to determine what level of time and funding should be provided to ensure that the project maintains the highest ability to produce a net profit. Similarly, the authors argue that product success can further be maximized by dividing the stages of product testing and development into early and late stages. By further defining the metrics with respect to what goals and tasks should be accomplished in the early and late stages, it is abundantly clear for product development where the product lies in terms of ove rall viability at any particular juncture of the process. In this way, the guess work is taken out of the process and long-term product developments that can turn into a multimillion dollar mistake are effectively weeded out. This novel approach is simplistic; however, it nonetheless works. Many firms have followed in

History of Cognitive Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

History of Cognitive Psychology - Essay Example The contribution of early researchers under the guidance of cognitive behaviour made it possible to verify every research. They did not design a grand scheme to guide cognitive psychology through its development. Rather, early researchers applied insights from their immediate work to make initial headway. Their accomplishments were substantial and are reflected extensively in current work. (Barsalou, Lawrence.1992, p. 341) Modern psychology is initiated with the enhanced significance in cognition, which is unsceptical, as the same approach has been shared by all the researchers hitherto, which possess a solid ground of theoretical methodology. Cognitive psychology began to explore towards the end of the nineteenth century when in 1879 the first psychology laboratory was set up by Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig. Wundt's research was mainly concerned with perception, including some of the earliest studies of visual illusions. Among one of the major studies on visual illusions was visual processing proposed by Mishkin in 1982. (Hahn, Martin, 1999, p. 71). In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus published the first experimental research on memory, and many subsequent researchers were to adopt his methods over the years that followed. Perhaps the most lasting work of this early period was a remarkable book written by William James in 1890, entitled Principles of Psychology. (Groome, David, 1999, p. 5). In this book James proposed a number of theories, which still remain acceptable to modern cognitive psychologists, including a theory distinguishing between short-term working memory and long-term storage memory. Watson (1913) Watson was the first cognitive psychologist to state the behaviourist position clearly as before Watson there was little progress in cognitive psychology in the early years due to the growing influence of behaviourism. Being the first influential figure, he maintained that psychologists should consider only observable variables such as the stimulus presented to the organism and any consequent response to that stimulus. He argued that they should not concern themselves with processes that they could not observe in a scientific manner, such as thought and conscious experience. The behaviourists were essentially trying to establish psychology as a true science, comparable in status with other sciences such as physics or chemistry. This was perhaps a worthy aim, but it had unfortunate consequences for the study of psychology for the next fifty years, as it had the effect of restricting experimental psychology mainly to the recording of externally observable responses. (Groome, David, 19 99, p. 5) Indeed, some behaviourists were so enthusiastic to explore beyond human experience that they never bothered to eliminate inner mental processes from their studies, which showed their eagerness to work on rats rather than on human subjects. No doubt, what experience a human being brings to a laboratory, nothing else can bring. B.F. Skinner (1938) Skinner, continued the classic work on the behaviourist approach, by training