During development of an innovative product there is often considerable uncertainty about component production cost, and it is of interest for both the manufacturer and the supplier to engage in a collaborative effort to reduce this uncertainty and lower the expected cost. Despite the obvious...

We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus--the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment--increases returns to IT, especially when...

To what extent do firms engage in product line actions simultaneously with actions in other marketing variables? What are the determinants of product line actions? To what extent are product line actions proactive? To what degree are they reactive? How can a firm's product line action elasticity...

In their quest to manage the complexity of offering greater product variety, firms in many industries are considering platform-based product development. Product platforms, which are component and subsystem assets shared across a product-family, enable a firm to better leverage investments in...

This paper presents a case study of the impact of manufacturing offshore on technology competitiveness in the optoelectronics industry. It examines a critical design/facility location decision being faced by optoelectronic component manufacturers. This paper uses a combination of simulation...

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...

A fundamental problem in managing product development is the optimal timing, frequency, and fidelity of sequential testing activities that are carried out to evaluate novel product concepts and designs. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model that treats testing as an activity that...

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....

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...

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...