Product development is increasingly viewed as a distributed process involving networks of specialised service providers and co-ordinated by a lead partner. Although this creates new opportunities for innovation it also produces new challenges for optimisation of the process. This paper explores the dynamics of these emergent innovation processes, paying particular attention to the influences of distributedness, speed, entrepreneurship and uncertainty. The consumer electronics industry is selected for study as the separation of product design, development and manufacture is already well advanced, and as it exhibits a relatively high 'clockspeed'. A number of exploratory case-studies are described, and the results are discussed in the light of the distributed innovation paradigm.