Conclusion: new perspectives

This presentation, which favors an academic approach to concurrent engineering, must also consider its deployment.

Its practice has now outgrown the experimental cases too often regarded as exceptions. However, the American experience must still be contrasted with that of France.

For informed observers, the principles of concurrent engineering underpinned the design-build approach. Too rapid an assimilation between the working methodology and the specific contextual conditions of certain operations has led to a drastic restriction on its use in French public procurement. This explains a certain intellectual disinterest in the issue. In short, "we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater". Only large private contractors have adopted this collective working method.

In the United States, Anglo-Saxon pragmatism has...