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...

The automotive industry has reached a mature state, as is evidenced by its growth and by the nature of competition (cost, speed, variants, a rush into a few growing regions and segments), and industry consolidation. In parallel, technical progress continues to be dynamic. In this paper, we...

The public debate in Europe is turning against business because outsourcing and off-shoring are perceived to destroy jobs, and corporate profitability is seen as inconsistent with a wage stagnation of salaried employees. Managers in Europe feel surrounded by hostile regulation, protected product...

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...

Biological cells run complicated and sophisticated production systems. The study of the cell's production technology provides us with insights that are potentially useful in industrial manufacturing. When comparing cell metabolism with manufacturing techniques in industry, we find some striking...

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...