We present a model that suggests possible explanations for the observed proliferation of "pay-per-use" (PPU) business models over the last two decades. Delivering "fractions" of a product as a service off ers a cost advantage to customers with lower usage but requires extra delivery costs....

This article develops a model of a project as a payoff function that depends on the state of the world and the choice of a sequence of actions. A causal mapping, which may be incompletely known by the project team, represents the impact of possible actions on the states of the world. An...

We present an evolutionary model of technology diffusion in which an old and a new technology are available, both of which improve their performance incrementally over time. Technology adopters make repeated choices between the established and the new technology based on their perceived...

Selecting program portfolios within a budget constraint is an important challenge in the management of new product development (NPD). Optimal portfolios are difficult to define because of the combinatorial complexity of project combinations. However, at the aggregate level of the strategic...

Organizations engage in search whenever they perform nonroutine tasks, such as the definition and validation of a new strategy, the acquisition of new capabilities, or new product development. Previous work on search and organizational hierarchy has discovered that a hierarchy with a central...

Overlapping development activities is widely used to reduce project completion times in product development. However, research on the applicability of the concept in different technological environments remains scarce. So far, very few industry-specific studies have statistically confirmed an...

A major challenge in the creation of custom-designed products lies in the elicitation of customer needs. As customers are frequently unable to accurately articulate their needs, designers typically create one or several prototypes, which they then present to the customer. This process, which we...

An important managerial problem in product design in the extent to which testing activities are carried out in parallel or in series. Parallel testing has the advantage of proceeding more rapidly than serial testing but does not take advantage of the potential for learning between tests, thus...

We present an analytical model of concurrent engineering, where an upstream and a down-stream task are overlapped to minimize time-to-market. The gain from overlapping activities must be weighed against the delay from rework that results from proceeding in parallel based on preliminary...

Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain R...D projects, as management can repeatedly gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. This value is now well accepted and referred to as "real...