Effects of demand forecast and resource sharing on collaborative new product development in supply chain

Abstract

In today's volatile global marketplace co-developing of new products is increasingly important, owing to the uncertainties of developing and launching a new product. The collaborative new product development process however, presents a new challenge for the partner firms due to the sharing of information, resources and technology. Literature has not adequately addressed the issues associated with collaborative decision making that has to be robust in an environment with varying performance, quality and timing uncertainties, despite the growing need to collaborate. In our model, we consider a product development company and a technology development company with different but symbiotic capabilities. We analyze various scenarios, assessing the benefits and downsides of demand forecast information sharing on each company and the supply chain as a whole. The scenarios analyzed vary according to the level of technology, innovation and resources shared between the firms.