Virtualization technologies in product development: A cross-industrial user-study

Increasing complexity, high variance and diversity of products as well as ever-decreasing innovation cycles represent the significant challenges of the today's product development. Companies need to find possibilities to handle these changing circumstances in order to achieve their product innovations and to serve customer needs. One possible solution to deal with these challenges is the virtualization of product development. This approach seems to be increasingly inevitable for future product development. By using different virtualization technologies (VT) products can be developed more quickly, cheaper and with a better quality. However, virtualization technologies require new competencies in organizations and processes. Findings of this cross-industrial user study showed differences between automotive and non-automotive industry regarding current and prospective use of VT as well as subjective experience and intrinsic motivation of using VT. Thus, non-automotive industry seems to act more application-oriented at this time.