Talk:Product Development and Management Association

Notes on the references
Here is my review of the first 13 items from the reference list. I was searching for reliable sources. It is my hope that the article can be rewritten so it has much less reliance on PDMA's website and publications, and uses evaluations from outsiders. EdJohnston (talk) 21:18, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

1. PDMA's website

2. CFO Magazine: not about PDMA, but quotes Robin Karol, the president. Here is the entire quote: Killing a project should also be done as soon as possible, says Robin Karol, CEO of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), an industry group: "Given the pace of information flows," she explains, "companies need to bail fast." According to the PDMA, the Product Performance Institute, and Cap Gemini, only 2.5 percent of ideas get to the development stage at best-practice companies. At average companies, the ratio is more like 12 percent. The result? Best-practice companies spend a lot less time and money on failures. In fact, only 20 percent of their development resources go to products that bomb. By comparison, less enlightened businesses pour close to half of their development capital into losers.

This shows that CFO Magazine found some numbers interesting in a particular survey done by PDMA and two other groups. They also found PDMA's president worthy of calling for a quote. That's all it shows. This article doesn't say anything about PDMA as an organization that might be used in the future to expand the Wikipedia article. There is no info currently in the article which is sourced to this quote.

3. Njbiz.com, a New Jersey business publication that might be a reliable source, found a press release by PDMA worthy of reprinting. The event being covered was PDMA's appointment of the new Board of Directors for 2007. Nothing substantive in this writeup that is not sourced to PDMA itself.

4. Article in The Hindu (www.thehindu.com), probably a reliable source. Quotes the local guy (a business professor) who is one of the organizers of a PDMA-sponsored conference in India. Here is the entire interesting segment:

In the existing engineering and technology curricula, product or industrial design and product functions (like computer aided design) are studied in engineering schools. But process innovations in the form of management, risk or market research for introducing innovation, are studied in isolation in B-schools. A broader perspective that combines these different areas is not available, nor is there an established forum to bring together the various stakeholders such as industrial practitioners, industries, customers, academia, researchers and the government to talk about new product development or innovation. This despite India being recognised as a powerhouse for outsourced design work, says Prof. K. Chandrasekaran, Dean of RMK Engineering College, and who is spearheading the creation of an India chapter of Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He says the academia, industry and the government realise that product design and development in India and innovation management should be treated as thrust areas especially when India's strength in back end processes such as CAD/CADM are recognised globally. "Now, we all realise that the fuzzy end of product innovation needs to be strengthened. That is why an international conference on innovation is to be held from Wednesday in the city in association with the PDMA

5. Simply the conference announcement for a PDMA-sponsored conference.

6. Industry Week. http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=3521. Seems to be a reprinted press release announcing the PDMA's annual meeting in October, 2005.

7. Announcement of their FEI conference, to be held in May 2008. (Co-sponsored with IIR USA). Keynoted by some fairly big-name speakers. This announcement is posted on IIR USA's website, which is their conference partner, and thus not independent.

8. JPIM's self-description on Blackwell's website. All info is obviously sourced to PDMA.

9. Article in Business Week on The Catalyst Awards, which are *not* awards sponsored by PDMA. However, Walter Herbst who is an author of a book *published* by PDMA was invited to help choose the 2005 winners of the Catalyst Awards. There is also a nice throw-away line in the article that the Herbst-authored PDMA Handbook of Product Development is 'considered the industry standard. 'This *does* appear to increase the notability of PDMA, though the information content is small.

10. Simply the Amazon book description for The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development. This probably belongs in the article, though it doesn't help show notability of PDMA. We can probably regard Kenneth Kahn's opinions expressed in the book as reliable sources about *non-PDMA* matters. There are only two independent reviews on Amazon (others are identified by Amazon as taken from the book itself!).

11. PDMA Toolbook 1. Probably doesn't need to be referenced. Can be included as part of the '122 books' found by a Google book search.

12. PDMA Toolbook 2. I think we can also do without.

13. JPIM joins 10 top academic business journals. Would be acceptable if not sourced frrom PDMA's website. Also it would be nice to know how many journals were in the sample. Plus, is 1.623 high or low compared to journals in other fields? For this question, it would be better to use the paper by Vasilis Theoharakis and Andrew Hirst, "Perceptual differences of marketing journals: a worldwide perspective.'' Marketing Letters 13(4), 389-402 (2002). EdJohnston (talk) 21:18, 2 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Great find. That reference (here) shows PDMA's JPIM academic journal to be #19 worldwide, just immediately below MIT's highly prestigious Sloan Management Review.  Then consider the fact that JPIM is devoted JUST to the topic of new product development, whereas all the others are much broader in their scope.  PDMA / JPIM has a specific focus on innovation which the others do not and are not restricted by.  It's remarkable that this journal is ranked as high as it is.  Great find, Ed, thanks.  --Davolson (talk) 02:43, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

This wasn't among the original references, but here is one reference I found from a Business Week Online blog, about PDMA's Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award program: Nussbaum On Design. Note that he says: "If you don’t know the PDMA, you should check it out. It specializes in the 'how' of innovation."

I'll keep looking, but as I told Ed, the irony here is that PDMA is not self-promotional in its focus, has a next-to-zero marketing budget, and thus we're not plastered all over the internet with a efforts of a big PR firm, etc. Yet that's what some of you are accusing us of doing, in trying to keep a little presence in Wikipedia. --Davolson (talk) 03:13, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's something from Morningstar about the 2007 Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award: MSA Recognized as Outstanding Product Innovator. Admittedly, it's a press release but Morningstar found it worth running. I'll keep looking.--Davolson (talk) 03:17, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Here is a reference to BMW winning the PDMA Outstanding Corporate Innovator award, in a 2005 book on innovation called New Product Development by Sameer Kumar and Promma Phrommathed: preview.tinyurl.com/32hoc3 --Davolson (talk) 03:38, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Here is a reference in an Intel newsletter about BMW winning PDMA's OCI award. Intel values PDMA highly enough to cite them here. Driving Down Support Costs, Supporting Mobility: BMW Practices Proactive PC Replacement, Deploys Intel® Mobile Technology--Davolson (talk) 03:42, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

And here's something from The Economist. (Is that prestigious enough?) Harnessing Innovation  See page 7 in the box about PDMA, where it calls PDMA's award "prestigious". If The Economist considers PDMA prestigious, don't you think maybe Wikipedia should consider us at least the equal of things like current entries on "butt plugs" and "felching"? I mean, just how high is the bar here?

I can go on and on and on if you want. How many citations do you want? 50? 500?  5000?  --Davolson (talk) 03:54, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Ridiculing other WP articles is not helpful; the task is to make this one reach the proper standard. Your finding of the Intel remark about the OCI award is good. It would be even better if we saw the award to Intel being mentioned in the trade press, because they are a reliable source. The Economist mention could be usable, but it only adds to the notability of the OCI award, and there is no factual information in there that we can add to the PDMA article (except that the specific award took place). I sense that we will have to make the PDMA article smaller, since we don't find outsiders commenting on the organization's history or significance. The remark 'If you don't know the PDMA, you should check it out' (Business Week) is good, but it's a bit fragmentary. A longer writeup on PDMA in Business Week (if there had ever been one) would be quite credible. The Kumar book that you found mentioning the BMW award is good.  EdJohnston (talk) 13:21, 3 January 2008 (UTC)


 * My standard of comparison for this, from the very start of this, is the Wikipedia article on the American Marketing Association. It's just a stub.  All I really want for PDMA is a stub.  Instead, JzG deleted the whole page, making it impossible for anyone to ever add information to the page.  Either put PDMA's page up as a stub, or eliminate the page for the American Marketing Association.  Except for our size, the organizations are highly comparable.  Why are they OK, and we are not?  Where are their "external" and independent sources?  I don't see them in their article.  I'm asking for fairness and equanimity, that's all.    --Davolson (talk) 19:09, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Draft of a revised article
Encouraged by User:Davolson's suggestion (above) that what is needed is an adequate stub, so that a better article can eventually be built, I came up with the following. I will be filling in about ten references below to complete the article. Your comments are welcome.

The Product Development and Management Asssociation, or PDMA, is a non-profit professional society that organizes and publishes information about the development of new products. They currently have about 3000 members worldwide, with 24 chapters in the United States and six in other parts of the world, including India. They operate a training program which allows a student to become certified as a New Product Development Professional. They hold an annual conference that gives an opportunity for professional exchange, and they offer a wide range of publications: The bimonthly Journal of Product Innovation Management, Visions Magazine, and a series of books on development topics, including the PDMA Handbook of New Product Development. Their journal, published by Blackwell and held in numerous university libraries, ranked 19 out of 40 marketing journals that were evaluated for their usefulness in a 2002 study.

Modified the above posting to add references. I am planning to replace the current article with this version, and will notify the AfD participants. EdJohnston (talk) 19:48, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Looks like a good start to me, FWIW. At some point, I'd want to add the fact the organization was founded in 1976. Also, the number of members and chapters is factually incorrect.  Can I get a clarification about the COI issue:  if I am not being paid by PDMA, but am merely a PDMA member (albeit a knowledgeable one), am I allowed to edit the page?  Or is that still some sort of WP COI violation?  As of March 2008, I will no longer be PDMA's webmaster, which is why I ask.  Am I then permitted to edit the page? Or as a former webmaster, am I forever banned from doing so?  --Davolson (talk) 01:00, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Is there a paper publication that gives any of this information? If at all possible, it would be good to use reliable sources for what we add to the article in the future. Unfortunately the PDMA's web site is not a reliable source for these purposes. If JPIM gives the number of members or the number of chapters, I'd be OK with citing a JPIM article. It is still best if you don't edit the article yourself, for now. We'll see about the future. I'll keep this page on my watchlist, if you see changes that need to be made. EdJohnston (talk) 02:18, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The number of members and number of chapters keeps changing, and interestingly, the PDMA web site is always going to be the most accurate and reliable source of information on those two particular data, more so than any hard copy document which will always be out of date. I'm surprised that WP, of all folks, would de facto deem paper more valid than web information.  Doesn't it seem a bit, uh, a bit in conflict with WP's whole raison d'etre?  I won't touch the article.  But can run-of-the-mill PDMA members touch the article?  Can PDMA (volunteer, unpaid) board members?  I'm so confused... it seems again like anyone who knows anything about PDMA is not allowed to touch it, only people who don't know about it... you must admit that that's pretty bizarre. On other Wikipedia pages I see, people make changes all the time without being required to have specific cited external sources.  The information is constantly self-correcting, right?  So why does the PDMA page require external validation sources for every bit of information added, or information corrected, when these other pages do not?  If someone puts an erroneous number for the number of members, shouldn't someone else put the correct number?  Isn't it important that the page be correct?  Visions Magazine (published by PDMA) cited in an article in September 2007 a membership number of 2645 at the end of 2006.  That number though is way out of date.  It also cites the number of chapters as 32 rather than 24.  This is a hard copy magazine. --Davolson (talk) 06:19, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The term reliable source is used in a technical sense within Wikipedia. In general it has to be an edited publication (book, newspaper, magazine or an edited website of known reputation that may employ its own reporters) so PDMA's own website doesn't qualify. A reliable source also needs to be independent of the subject of the article. The only thing we could use www.pdma.org for for is to document PDMA's own opinion on some issue. (We could not cite pdma.org for the truth of any statements needing a reference).
 * PDMA board members should probably not edit this article either.
 * The exact number of members of PDMA is actually not vital to keep up to date, especially if no other publication has found time to comment on it. If you or other PDMA members have new significant information, you should not have trouble getting the attention of regular editors to have it added to the article.
 * In Wikipedia, the fact that other articles are worse is considered an argument to avoid. The one in front of us right now deserves to be brought up to the expected standard, whichever article we are working on. EdJohnston (talk) 13:45, 10 January 2008 (UTC)