Since Osborn's Applied Imagination book in 1953 (Osborn, A. F. 1953. Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York), the effectiveness of brainstorming has been widely debated. While some researchers and practitioners consider it the...

Companies innovating in dynamic environments face the combined challenge of unforeseeable uncertainty (the inability to recognize the relevant influence variables and their functional relationships; thus, events and actions cannot be planned ahead of time) and high complexity (large number of...

We study a single product two-period production/inventory model, in which the demands at each period are independent random variables. To optimally satisfy these random demands, quantities can be produced at the beginning of each period using slow or fast production mode, under capacity...

Burke, Carillo and Vakharia [2009] consider a class of single product sourcing problems with a stochastic demand and multiple uncertain suppliers. Assuming that the demand is independent of the supplier reliabilities and uniformly distributed, they propose to write the expected profit as a...

We consider a class of multi-periodic non-stationary stochastic single-product inventory planning problems where two procurement modes can be used at each period: a first order with immediate delivery and a second order with a single-period delivery delay. Clearly, the slow delivery mode is less...

We propose a stochastic programming approach for quantitative analysis of supply contracts, involving flexibility, between a buyer and a supplier, in a supply chain framework. Specifically, we consider the case of multi-periodic contracts in the face of correlated demands. To design such...

The production control, via hedging point policies, of a single part type manufacturing system with stochastic capacity and demand is discussed. In the present paper, several feasible operational modes may correspond to equal hedging points. For such generalized hedging point policies, we...

A proposed single-product, stochastic, two-period inventory control model combines demand forecast updating with the flexibility of two supply sources. Demand is modeled by two independent, random variables over a two-period selling season. At the beginning of the first period, two quantities...

Author's abstract. Motivated by many applications such as typical blockbuster product launches, we address in this paper, an inventory/production rollover process between an old and a new product, with a random availability/admissibility date for the new product. The optimization problem...

In this paper, we consider a two-stage supply contract model for advanced reservation of capacity, with payback option at the beginning of the selling season. Between the two decision stages, external information is collected that serves to update the demand forecast and permits to adjust the...