The techno-economic ecology of the product elimination process

Abstract

One of the greatest voids in the literature on product elimination to date is knowledge about the factors affecting the content, formality and other important aspects of the product elimination process. In this exploratory paper, an attempt is made to assess the impact of techno-economic environment and in particular the impact of technological change and three different forms of competition, on the content of the product elimination process. The impact is assessed by means of a cross-sectional analysis of questionnaire data from 94 industrial goods companies drawn from a large number of British engineering companies. Our data suggest that the content of the product elimination process of companies in dynamic, uncertain environments is likely to be significantly different from that of companies in relatively stable environments. Our data also suggest that there are striking differences between the techno-economic variables as to their relationships with the importance of the decision-variables describing the content of the product elimination process. The observed relationships, which reveal that the techno-economic environment leads to two different types or scenarios of product elimination process, are explained in terms of the contingencies created by the techno-economic variables.