Understanding the value of a product development project is central to a firm's choice of project portfolio. The value of a project to a firm depends not only on its properties but also on the other projects being developed by the firm. This is due to interactions with the other projects that...

In a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem--ideas--and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks--the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space,...

Design for manufacturing (DFM) has been promoted as a way to enhance product development and production system performance. Current DFM practices encourage the minimization of the number of parts in a design through the physical integration of several geometric features in the same part. While...

Using data from the U.S. bicycle industry, we examine the relation among product variety, supply chain structure, and firm performance. Variety imposes two types of costs on a supply chain: production costs and market mediation costs. Production costs include, among other costs, the incremental...

Product variety in many industries has increased steadily throughout this century. Component sharing---using the same version of a component across multiple products---is increasingly viewed by companies as a way to offer high variety in the marketplace while retaining low variety in their...

This paper is a review of research in product development, which we define as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. Our review is broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this...

This paper assesses the importance of design in determining product costs by measuring the variation in design performance among a set of competing design efforts. This assessment is completed for a set of functionally similar products in a single product category: automatic drip coffee makers....

A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might...

This article is a review of work published in Management Science on the topics of technological innovation, product development, and entrepreneurship since the inception of the journal in 1954. We intend the article to serve two goals. First, we hope that it will be useful to doctoral students...

When confronted with the task of developing a new product, a firm chooses either to design new components, unique to the product application, or to select components from those offered in the catalogs of suppliers or from those already in use in its other products. We call this the...