1 Key performance indicators: Global product development. Thomas Taylor (ttay@dtu.dk) Institute for Design Engineering and Innovation Department of Management Engineering The Technical University of Denmark Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen (sakr@dtu.dk) Institute for Design Engineering and Innovation Department of Management Engineering The Technical University of Denmark Abstract The decision to globalise parts of product development is a consequence of an increasingly competitive world market. The variety of risks and opportunities as a result of the decision make it difficult for management to evaluate if global product development has been successful. This paper investigates the use of key performance indicators as an approach for measuring the success of global product development projects. With the conclusions from a survey and workshop together with observations during a global development project, the need for an alternative approach to measurement than in conventional product development is highlighted. Keywords: Performance, Measurement, Global Product Development. Introduction Selecting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in conventional Product Development (PD) is a challenging task for project management and this is further compounded by Global Product Development (GPD). Challenges with relocating parts of PD globally such as communication barriers, Intellectual Property (IP) rights, aligning goals and expectations (Hansen and Ahmed-Kristensen, 2012), together with the desire to remain competitive by reducing costs, accessing new competencies and expertise (Christodoulou, 2007) make it difficult to assess if a project is performing or has performed successfully (Canez et al., 2000, Dabhilkar et al., 2008). Successful performance measurement requires the alignment of KPIs with strategic level objectives (Katharina and Lindemann, 2013, O’Donnel and Duffy, 2002, Neely et al., 2000). The Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1992) and the more recent Performance Prism (Neely et al., 2002) present two of the most well-documented and applied Performance Measurement Frameworks (PMF) to date. However, it is difficult to assess if these are reliable at an operational level in the context of GPD (Tangen, 2004, O’Donnell and