This paper examines complementarity among vertical integration decisions in automobile product development. Though most research assumes that contracting choices are independent of each other, contracting complementarity arises when the returns to a single vertical integration decision are...

This paper examines the impact of vertical integration on the dynamics of performance over the automobile product development life cycle. Building on recent work in organizational economics and strategy, we evaluate the relationship between vertical integration and different dimensions of...

This paper explores the performance of coupled development activities by proposing a performance generation model (PGM). The goal of the PGM is to develop insights about optimal strategies (i.e., sequential, concurrent, or overlapped) to manage coupled design activities that share a fixed amount...

This paper presents a model describing sequential iteration, one of the fundamental solution processes experienced in complex engineering design projects. The model is based upon the design structure matrix representation and assumes that each individual design activity is of deterministic...

Product architecture knowledge is typically embedded in the communication patterns of established development organizations. While this enables the development of products using the existing architecture, it hinders the organization's ability to implement novel architectures, especially for...

Intense competition in many industries forces manufacturing firms to develop new, higher quality products at an increasingly rapid pace. Overlapping product development activities is an important component of concurrent product development that can help firms develop products faster. However,...

Engineering design often involves a very complex set of relationships among a large number of coupled problems. It is this complex coupling that leads to iteration among the various engineering tasks in a large project. The design structure matrix (DSM) is useful in identifying where iteration...