From Engineer to CEO: What Building a Global NPD Process Taught Me About Innovation

Everyone talks about innovation.

Far fewer talk about what it actually takes to innovate across countries, cultures, business units, and product platforms.

Building a global New Product Development (NPD) process is where many of those complexities converge. It’s not simply about creating common stages or governance. It brings together engineers, manufacturing teams, commercial organizations, and regional leaders who each have different priorities, different markets, and different ways of working.

Throughout my career, I had the opportunity to help build that kind of global framework. It was an incredibly rewarding – and deeply challenging – experience because it reinforced a lesson I first learned as an engineer: successful innovation doesn’t begin inside the engineering department. It begins with understanding the customer.

Understanding the Customer (Also) Requires Seeing the Big Picture

I studied mechanical engineering at university and graduate school, and after joining Hitachi, I began my career developing industrial air compressors.

One of the unique advantages of many Japanese companies is the opportunity to work across various interrelated roles to better understand different functions. Rather than remaining in a single role, employees gain exposure to different parts of the business and develop a broader understanding of how value is created.

For me, engineering extended far beyond technical design. I became involved in activities ranging from product cost management and component registration to brochure development, field issue resolution, and customer visits. Over time, I worked across a variety of NPD functions, giving me a deeper understanding of how products move from concept to launch and how each team contributes to that journey.

Understanding the entire product lifecycle enabled me to see where traditional development processes broke down and where stronger global coordination was needed. As my responsibilities expanded throughout Japan, China, and the U.S., I found myself thinking less about individual products and more about how we could strengthen innovation across the business as a whole – globally.

The question was no longer simply, “How do we build a better product?” It became, “How do we build a better system for creating products that solve customer challenges around the world?”

The Complexity of Global Innovation

Developing new industrial products is inherently complex work, especially within a multi-national organization. Success requires building strong working relationships with colleagues from diverse cultures, while navigating the unique requirements, regulations, and customer expectations of different markets and regions. Add the need to balance speed, cost, sustainability, and customization, and new product development becomes a delicate exercise in managing competing priorities.

I have always loved a good challenge – mostly because it reveals opportunity.

At the time I was tasked with developing a new NPD process, our company had experienced significant growth through acquisitions and was ramping up production capacity. We had gained tremendous expertise, talent, and technical capabilities across multiple companies and regions. But with that growth came an important question: How could we bring all of those strengths together in a way that allowed us to innovate faster, collaborate more effectively, and create greater value for our customers?

Our goal with this new process was never to make every region operate identically. Instead, we focused on creating a common framework that encouraged collaboration, improved visibility, established shared development standards, and enabled knowledge sharing while preserving the flexibility needed to serve regional markets.

We needed common development standards and governance while allowing room for local expertise. We needed shared technology platforms while recognizing different markets have different customer expectations.

The framework itself was important, but the greater challenge was creating alignment among our global teams.

Building Alignment Across Cultures

Of course, there was resistance to the new global NPD process among teams at first. Considering each location and the teams within had their own working styles, priorities, organizational structure, approval processes, and so on, it was important to bring all sides together while being sensitive to distinct business cultures. 

To build trust and alignment between various departments in different locations, there had to be greater education; not just of the global NPD process itself but of each other’s cultures too.

This is when I decided to kickstart an international training program that would be adopted by several of our global facilities. By training participants in teams across borders, this significantly increased understanding between international departments, business cultures, and ways of working together. It also enhanced professional development, deeper global market understanding, and innovation. Upon returning to their home countries, their continued connection is a major part of how we continuously improve the global NPD process to this day.

Keeping the Customer at the Center

In the same way our employees’ experiences and priorities vary by region, so do our customers.

When coordinating the NPD process internationally, I believed it was important to consider the country of production and intended target markets while establishing an approach that combines global alignment with local expertise.

In the U.S., customers frequently place a high value on durability and equipment customization. In China, efficiency is often a primary focus. In Japan, where space can be limited, compact designs are especially important.

Because of these differences, it’s not possible to apply a single concept across every market. Instead, standardizing core technologies and components while allowing local adaptation where it matters most to customers provides the flexibility needed to address regional requirements.

This is why grouping markets strategically, allowing local teams to adapt non-core areas, and carefully listening to the perspectives of representatives in each region have been vital to my approach to global NPD.

Years later, as CEO, I was reminded again why this matters during a visit with a customer experiencing a service issue. Seeing firsthand the disruption it created – not only for production but for the people responsible for keeping operations running – reinforced something I had always known: every engineering decision ultimately affects a customer.

That customer visit stays with me to this day – and continues to shape how I think about innovation.

Looking Ahead

I believe the future of product development will continue to evolve through automation, AI, robotics, digital technologies, and more sustainable manufacturing practices.

These technologies will change how products are designed and built. But they will not change what successful innovation requires.

Organizations that innovate most effectively will be those that connect people across functions, regions, and cultures while remaining relentlessly focused on understanding their customers.

Looking back, building a global NPD framework was never just about creating better processes. It was about creating an organization capable of learning from one another, leveraging many diverse perspectives, staying flexible, and solving customer problems together.

Technology will continue to evolve. Markets will continue to change. But after decades spent working across functions, countries, and cultures, I remain convinced that the foundation of progress is still the same: people – employees, partners, and customers – working together across regions to solve complex challenges and create something better.