Complex Products and Systems (CoPS) form an increasingly important role in the economic activities of firms, industries and nations. Due to changing markets and technologies, over the past several years there has been a shift towards CoPS, particularly in advanced industrial nations. Only recently, however, has the importance of CoPS been recognised and systematically investigated. This paper focuses on problems or “hot spots” which firms experience in the development and production of CoPS and attempts to identify several common threads running through six in-depth case studies conducted in three industrial collaborators spanning three different industrial sectors.