TCS: By the mid-1990s, your research Their heavyweight projects might began focusing on product development appear lean if you look at them in the automotive sector. Tell us more individually. But if you look at a about that. company with a portfolio of products, Cusumano: One of my doctoral the Japanese heavyweight project students at the time (Kentaro Nobeoka) management teams were too self- and I studied automotive product contained. They weren’t sharing very development. An earlier study by two of much. So it was actually becoming our colleagues (Kim Clark and Takahiro expensive for them to develop new Fujimoto, who published the research automobiles. Nobeoka and I wrote in their book Product Development more about that in our 1998 book8 Performance), found U.S. automobile (Thinking Beyond Lean). companies were generally taking 60 to 64 months to develop a new vehicle. TCS: So then you shifted your research on The Japanese were pretty close to a automotive manufacturing and product 48-month schedule and doing it with development to the software industry. Tell about two-thirds the engineering hours. us more about that. Cusumano: I actually shifted my But we had identified a problem in major research emphasis to software our research in the mid-1990s: The engineering even before I published Japanese automakers had become my first book in 1985 on the Japanese in many ways too lean. They weren’t automobile industry. Large-scale sharing much technology across software development became my projects within the same company. main focus from 1984. 8 Amazon, Thinking Beyond Lean, September 4,1998, accessed March 15, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/ Thinking-Beyond-Lean-Transforming-Development/dp/0684849186#reader_0684849186