After fast growth in recent 20 years, Chinese economy has made attractive progress in
the world, and is well known as the world manufacture centre. Many Chinese firms
especially in high-tech industries have started to technically lead in the China and
international market. However, in the Western literature, Chinese companies are still
focusing on copy rather than innovators, while China is a country with huge
manufacturing capability but poor in advanced technology, innovation and R&D
competence. These visions are facing challenges from fast growing Chinese telecom
equipment industry. As one of the major telecom vendor in China and worldwide
telecom market, much attention has been paid to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
(Huawei), particularly in its product development. The success of Huawei was the
results introduced by a huge effort to reengineer its previous product development
process based on Integrated Product Development (IPD), which helps Huawei to
improve R&D efficiency and competence with high quality, to reduce time-to-market,
efficiently to fill market requirement for their telecom customer significantly.
Since IPD originated from PACE (Produce And Cycle-time Excellence) theory, IPD
has been widely discussed and adopted in the R&D (Research&Development) among
different industries. However, while IPD theory has been wildly and deeply
developed, few of them focus on the product development of telecom equipment
vendors, especially telecom equipment vendors in developing countries, like China.
The existing theory of product development theory just focus on the research and
analysis about the telecom vendors in developed countries, and can’t explain why the
Chinese telecom vendors, like Huawei can develop competitive telecom solution and
becoming a leading telecom player in very short time.
The present research analyzes a special group of telecom vendors in China, which are
the companies in the first tier of world telecom equipment vendor, like
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Nokia-Siemens, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent etc. with explicit strategy to develop
product dependent on their product developemtn competence themselves . This
research will specify the context of IPD model and clarify IPD process in order to
point out the key facts of a successful product development process in telecom
vendors. Meanwhile, through the comparison between different telecom equipment
vendors and cast study, this research will analyze the differentiation of product
development between a famous fast growing telecom vendor, Huawei and a stable
growth telecom vendor-ASB (Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell), and clarify how these
differentiations support Huawei to grow up consistently in terms of R&D competence,
product portfolio and market position etc.