The competitive advantage of a manufacturing enterprise in a global economy is directly related to its capacity to introduce new products on the market, guaranteeing technological actualised product lines, with characteristics of quality, cost and time according to actual clients exigency. However, a great difficulty of the integrated management of product development is the existence of few professionals capacitated to act efficiently in this business process, characterised as multifunctional. That is, professionals who have a whole and integrated vision of this process. A form to help this professional capacitation is based on the utilisation of a new learning approach, characterised by active didactics, denominated scenario. This approach is supported by reference models, by which the required knowledge to the business process execution can be obtained. In this context, this article has the goal to discuss the professional capacitation question, related to the product development process, employing the scenario approach. This article not only presents a characterisation of the product development process and the requirements for capacitating its collaborators, but also describes a practical case of professional capacitation, carried out in a multinational enterprise in Brazil, utilising the scenario approach and the action research method.
product development; professional capacitation; learning organization
