Product Development Community Research Articles

Time-to-Market and Product Performance Tradeoff Revisited

The profitability, and even the survival, of organizations depends on the number and quality of new products introduced into the market. However, the process of developing new products (and estimating the proper timing for their introduction into the market) remains a rich topic for research and investigation within the product development (PD) community as it lies at the intersection of the engineering and marketing disciplines. A unifying model that brings both engineering and marketing concerns together is necessary to bridge the gap between both disciplines. In this article, a mathematical model is introduced to study the tradeoff between product performance and time-to-market for different PD scenarios. These scenarios vary in three main aspects related to product characteristics (i.e., the product complexity and the product newness) and supply chain configuration (i.e., the degree of supplier involvement). The model aims to maximize the revenue of the firm over a limited marketing window. The optimal solution reveals interesting managerial insights regarding the time that must be spent on “system design” and on “detailed design” phases for each PD scenario.

Application of the poisson distribution in the prediction of the number of defects in a textile factory

A problem faced by the product development community is the probabilistic prediction of the number of defects per square meter in industrial processes. This work presented a calculation made by the software Minitab 19, in a company in the South of Rio de Janeiro State, in which the number of defects per square meter in a textile factory was calculated and discussed.

Simultaneous optimization response surface experiments with several response variables

A problem facing the product development community is developing simultaneous solutions of response variables (to several properties) that depends on a number of independent variables or sets of responses. Harrington, among others, addressed this problem and presented a desirability function with a functional approach. Derringer and Suich altered their approach and illustrated how multiple variables can be transformed into a convenience function. This work redid the calculation performed by them using another software and made a comparative discussion of the results found.

How to perform a simultaneous optimization with several response variables

A problem facing the product development community is developing simultaneous solutions of response variables (to several properties) that depends on a number of independent variables or sets of responses. Harrington, among others, addressed this problem and presented a desirability function with a functional approach. Derringer and Suich altered their approach and illustrated how multiple variables can be transformed into a convenience function. This work redid the calculation performed by them using another software and made a comparative discussion of the results found.

Empowerment-Based Lecturer Professional Development at State Islamic Religious Universities

This study aims to find, analyze, and describe internal and external factors that contribute to the professional development of lecturers; alternative strategies and priorities for empowerment-based lecturer professional development strategies at State Islamic Religious Universities. This research is field research using the descriptive analytical method. Data was obtained from observations, literature studies, key informants, and experts. The results of this study indicate that; First, the ability of IAIN Palopo's internal factors is powerful and able to overcome its weaknesses in the professional development of lecturers. In addition, IAIN Palopo has a reasonably high opportunity and is very responsive in overcoming challenges in the professional development of lecturers. Second, several alternative strategies were formulated, leading to the implementation of an integration strategy through market penetration and product development (research, community service, and article writing) through collaboration with universities and other institutions both domestically and abroad, by empowering scientific consortiums lecturers and international center.

Proposed Tool to Compare and Assess the Applicability of Taste Assessment Techniques for Pharmaceuticals

Palatability is amongst the most important determinants of whether or not a child will take a medicine. In order to increase concordance with treatment regimens it is often necessary to utilise a range of formulation techniques to improve the palatability of medicines. These can include selecting a different molecule or version of a molecule (such as a different polymorph or salt form), various taste masking techniques and/or the inclusion of flavours and sweeteners.In order to be able to understand the taste of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) and to validate the formulation approach used, it is necessary to be able to use the most reliable taste evaluation method possible. Multiple in vivo and in vitro methods exist nowadays or are proposed in the literature but are often little understood by the pharmaceutical product development community. In particular, different methods may be more relevant at different stages of product development. The aim of this article is to propose a tool to guide the selection of the most appropriate method for the desired evaluation. A spreadsheet-based tool is proposed that is designed to allow the systematic assessment of the applicability of any taste assessment technique existing or new to the users proposed application. A series of criteria are defined that will allow the user to assess the analytical, usability and availability factors for the technique that is being considered. Such a systematic review will help the user to understand the benefits and risks of using each methodology for that application. The use of the tool is illustrated based on currently available data and literature. As new/existing methods are developed/improved, the outcomes of the tool may change.

User idea implementation in open innovation communities: Evidence from a new product development crowdsourcing community

AbstractIn collaborative crowdsourcing communities for open innovation, users generate and submit ideas as idea co‐creators. Firms then select and implement valuable ideas for new product development. Despite the popularity and success of these open innovation communities, relatively little is known about the factors that determine the implementation of the user‐generated ideas. Based on research on individual creativity, we propose a conceptual model integrating users' previous experience, idea presentation characteristics and feedback valence to explain the likelihood of idea implementation. We validate our research model with a panel data analysis of 43 550 ideas submitted by 16 360 users in the MIUI new product development community hosted by Xiaomi, a large electronics manufacturing company in China. We find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between users' past successful experience and idea implementation. Furthermore, the length of ideas is positively associated with the likelihood of idea implementation. There is also an inverted U‐shaped relationship between supporting evidence and idea implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the negative effect of positive feedback and the positive effect of negative feedback on idea implementation. These findings offer rich insights to understand the phenomenon of open innovation better. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Robotic process automation: assessment of the technology for transformation of business processes

We examine how robotic process automation (RPA) can be deployed as a technology solution in business processes and services as a transformation lever beyond traditional business process management and outsourcing. RPA is a new breed of software that allows for enterprise-wide automation of repetitive business processes, with the promise of potential FTE savings, better service quality and improved service delivery. Through an extensive survey of practitioners involved with RPA, this exploratory research identifies the motivation and challenges of RPA implementation as envisaged by the user communities. We also find the complementary perspectives of RPA product development communities. Consequently, we recommend ways to align the perspectives of the user communities and the developer communities to enable definitive value creation for the organisations. The findings and recommendations would help practitioners who develop RPA products or adopt these products in their IT ecosystems.

Dynamic robustness of knowledge collaboration network of open source product development community

As an emergent innovative design style, open source product development communities are characterized by a self-organizing, mass collaborative, networked structure. The robustness of the community is critical to its performance. Using the complex network modeling method, the knowledge collaboration network of the community is formulated, and the robustness of the network is systematically and dynamically studied. The characteristics of the network along the development period determine that its robustness should be studied from three time stages: the start-up, development and mature stages of the network. Five kinds of user-loss pattern are designed, to assess the network’s robustness under different situations in each of these three time stages. Two indexes – the largest connected component and the network efficiency – are used to evaluate the robustness of the community. The proposed approach is applied in an existing open source car design community. The results indicate that the knowledge collaboration networks show different levels of robustness in different stages and different user loss patterns. Such analysis can be applied to provide protection strategies for the key users involved in knowledge dissemination and knowledge contribution at different stages of the network, thereby promoting the sustainable and stable development of the open source community.

Estimating Local Decision-Making Behavior in Complex Evolutionary Systems

Research in systems engineering and design is increasingly focused on complex sociotechnical systems whose structures are not directly controlled by the designers, but evolve endogenously as a result of decisions and behaviors of self-directed entities. Examples of such systems include smart electric grids, Internet, smart transportation networks, and open source product development communities. To influence the structure and performance of such systems, it is crucial to understand the local decisions that result in observed system structures. This paper presents three approaches to estimate the local behaviors and preferences in complex evolutionary systems, modeled as networks, from its structure at different time steps. The first approach is based on the generalized preferential attachment model of network evolution. In the second approach, statistical regression-based models are used to estimate the local decision-making behaviors from consecutive snapshots of the system structure. In the third approach, the entities are modeled as rational decision-making agents who make linking decisions based on the maximization of their payoffs. Within the decision-centric framework, the multinomial logit choice model is adopted to estimate the preferences of decision-making nodes. The approaches are illustrated and compared using an example of the autonomous system (AS) level Internet. The approaches are generally applicable to a variety of complex systems that can be modeled as networks. The insights gained are expected to direct researchers in choosing the most applicable estimation approach to get the node-level behaviors in the context of different scenarios.

The Consumer Digital Video Library [Best of the Web

Video is a booming industry: content is embedded on many Web sites, delivered over the Internet, and streamed to mobile devices. Content providers own vast quantities of studio-quality video (i.e., produced to the quality standards of a television studio), but legal contracts between actors, producers, and owners limit how and where others can use such video. As a result, finding and getting rights to use relevant video remains an obstacle to addressing relevant research problems. The Consumer Digital Video Library (CDVL) Web site (http//:www.cdvl.org) attempts to address this obstacle. The CDVL makes high-quality, uncompressed video clips available for free download. Content owners have granted permission for use, and a use agreement protects owners? rights. The clips are ideal for use by the education, research, and product development communities. Developing objective video quality models and testing emergency telemedicine systems are two applications enabled by CDVL content.

Authority and Managing Innovation: A Typology of Product Development Teams and Communities

Understanding the conditions under which organizational groups operate is basic for successfully managing innovation. The goal of this article is to provide a typology for distinguishing different forms of communities and teams that promote innovation. Existing typologies are incomplete because they neither look at procedural and institutional authority simultaneously, nor include all kinds of groups used for progressing innovation. This article pays particular attention to two key variables that impact productivity, namely the relationship of groups to institutional and procedural authority. Four groups, autonomous and functional teams and communities of practice and epistemic communities, are linked to the two dimensions. Accordingly, the article provides a conceptual framework for understanding how various groups function and manage themselves in subtle, different ways. By choosing various innovation groups for different purposes, firms can respond to change and create a competitive advantage. Intervention strategies that help to achieve successful innovation outcomes of groups are discussed. Finally, the article suggests further research areas.

Editorial

This last issue of 2012 presents a number of very interesting articles about creativity and innovation management. The first article, by Sabrina Adamczyk, Angelika Bullinger and Kathrin Möslein, is about innovation contests. Innovation contests are growing tremendously in popularity as a means to realize innovative products and services. In this article, the authors review and classify the growing body of literature on these contests, present crucial elements for understanding, designing and managing them, and propose a research agenda. This article is based on a conference paper presented at the EURAM conference in 2011 and was selected by Anna Trifilova and John Bessant. The second article, by Markus Grote, Cornelius Herstatt and Hans Georg Gemünden, focuses on cross-divisional innovation in large corporations. Forty-five years after Ansoff's influential work on synergies, many multidivisional corporations still struggle to create additional value. The authors examine the role of cross-divisional collaboration in the early stages of the innovation process and test a model in a quantitative study in 110 multidivisional firms. They conclude that the extent of collaboration in the early stages of innovation strongly determines the impact of cross-divisional products on corporate success, and that appropriate integration mechanisms and incentives are highly relevant. In the third article, Anne Koch presents a typology of product development teams and communities that promote innovation. Based on the relationship of groups to institutional and procedural authority, four categories can be distinguished: autonomous teams, functional teams, communities of practice, and epistemic communities. The author provides a framework for understanding how these various groups function and manage themselves in different ways, and argues that by choosing various innovation groups for different purposes, firms can create a competitive advantage. She proposes intervention strategies and an agenda for further research. The articles by Thomas Clauß and by Monique Goepel, Katharina Hölzle and Dodo zu Knyphausen-Aufseß form a mini-special, guest-edited by Patrick Spieth. These are based on papers that were selected from the EURAM conference in 2011. The article by Thomas Clauß focuses on the influence of the type of relationship on the generation of innovations in buyer-supplier collaborations. Based on a sample of 250 small and mid-sized enterprises from the German machinery construction sector, the author classifies buyer-supplier relationships empirically into four types, and relates these to innovation outcomes. He concludes that a relational context fosters joint innovation, and that high formalization can also lead to innovation, if it is legitimated. The article by Monique Goepel, Katharina Hölzle and Dodo zu Knyphausen-Aufseß is about innovation response behaviour. Innovation response behaviour is individuals’ novelty-supporting or novelty-impeding behaviour. Based on the theory of planned behaviour, the authors elaborate by which factors and in which ways individuals’ innovation response behaviour is influenced, and they develop a typology, distinguishing between active and passive modes of conduct. This typology forms a framework for studying the innovation process from an actor-based perspective, and links existing research on individual innovation with the process of innovation at an organizational level. The sixth article of this issue, by Monika Schuhmacher and Sabine Kuester, is based on a conference paper presented at the International Product Development Management Conference in Delft 2011. It focuses on the identification of lead user characteristics, in particular in idea contests for service innovations. The authors examine the impact of specific lead user characteristics on the quality of service innovation ideas. Based on a study of 120 ideas resulting from an idea contest for new online services of soccer clubs, the authors demonstrate that dissatisfaction with existing services has the highest impact on idea quality. Furthermore, highly experienced users are shown to provide ideas of higher quality. In the final paper of this issue, Julia Froehlich and Martin Hoegl study thematic ideation. This is a cognitive process in which the recognition of thematic similarity rather than categorical similarity is the source of new ideas. The authors theoretically develop and empirically test a set of antecedents and consequences of thematic thinking in a quantitative study. Their research indicates that experience and positive affect are positively related to thematic thinking and that, counter-intuitively, thematic thinking is negatively related to creativity.

Some methodological issues in the development of public health recommendations from field trials of new malaria vector control interventions

In this paper, I consider some technical aspects of the process by which public health recommendations are inferred from the results of epidemiological field trials and other research on new vector control products and technologies. I argue that the conventional Cochrane Collaboration methods for summarising clinical trials may need to be modified and extended in order to be valid when applied to vector control. With medical interventions, for which the Cochrane methods were originally designed, the primary mode of action of the intervention works through biological processes within an individual, and the individual person is a natural experimental unit. This makes it easier to assume that a series of trials from different locations are more or less replicates of each other: they are asking more or less the same question, and in the absence of bias and sampling error they should produce more or less the same answer. In the case of vector control, on the other hand, the intervention has its most direct effects on mosquitoes, and the causal chain that leads to health benefits mostly occurs outside people, in the external environment. For this reason, in order to summarise a series of vector control trials, it is necessary to standardise not only the human populations, the interventions and the observed outcomes, but also the local vector populations and the broader ecological characteristics of the settings where the trials were carried out. Only with this additional matching is it valid to assume that vector control trials carried out in different settings are asking the broadly same question about the same intervention. The same applies to the process of generalising from a set of field trials in specific settings to broader public health recommendations. We know from first principles that a vector control intervention that is effective in one setting may not be so in another. Moreover, the field trials of a new intervention can include only a small subset of the likely range of settings where the intervention might eventually be used. Thus we need systematic methods for asking not just “whether” an intervention will be effective, but also “where and when” it will be effective. In the past, malariologists have used “eco-epidemiological stratification” to deal with this problem: this approach now needs to be made more systematic and integrated. Particular attention therefore needs to be given to the “epidemiological mode of action” of entomological interventions. This is the causal chain by which effects on mosquitoes lead to reduced infective biting for at least some people (e.g. “personal protection” and “the mass effect” caused by ITNs). This useful new concept, which has emerged from current discussions within the vector control product development community, appears to play a central role in the interpretation of evidence from vector control field trials for public health purposes.

But will they buy it?

A product's success or failure may often depend on how well the product was defined before it was developed. Some products based on a developer's concepts may become popular and in demand, but, in most cases, because of the narrow perspective of a developer's specific application, such products rarely hit the high revenue mark. To raise the probability of success for a newly announced product or product enhancement, both the marketing and development communities must have a road map of the direction they wish to take. These road maps are referred to as market requirements and product (or technical) specifications, both of which are required for the testing organization to develop a comprehensive test plan. The more complete and detailed these two documents are, the greater the probability that the product will succeed in the marketplace.

Food Intolerances, Food Allergies, and Restaurants

Twelve million consumers in the United States have a food allergy. This research was designed to see whether restaurants are prepared to respond to the needs of consumers with food intolerances or food allergies. It is apparent that the respondents have little awareness of their needs. The majority did not have printed materials available, were not aware of potential legislation, and did not have defined personnel responsible for identifying allergens. Given the increased attention to food allergen and food intolerance issues among consumers of food and within the food product development community, this is unfortunate, because restaurants may find themselves unable to adequately meet the needs of such customers.

Product sustainability: organisational considerations

Most eco-design research has focused on design strategies, methodologies and tools. However, to ensure that eco-design is successfully implemented, companies require strategic, tactical and operational organisational structures and systems to be considered. This article discusses a range of organisational issues in the development and implementation of eco-design and a broader approach to sustainable product development (product sustainability). The article draws together a range of desk research, observation and unstructured conversations with eco-design practitioners and experts, as well as my own concurrent experience as global chair of a group of international experts that wrote and produced the Eco-design Standard ISO14006: 2011 (published globally in July 2011). The article demonstrates to the wider product development community that eco-design is not just an operational design issue at the level of product design and engineering, and highlights this by illustrating through practical examples the wider organisational issues in developing, managing and implementing eco-design and broader product sustainability. On the basis of this research I led the planning, structuring and writing of the article. My co-author contributed specific research elements, expert comments and made editorial suggestions.

A generic and extensible information infrastructure framework for mass-customizing platform products

This paper discusses the design and development of an information infrastructure for customizing platform products on a mass scale. The resulting framework provides a technology forum for the Mass Customization (MC) and Platform Product Development (PPD) communities to deploy their most advanced tools and techniques as online services, in order to enable and facilitate meaningful interoperability of information and knowledge management. The design and development have been based on MC concepts and latest Information Technology constructs. A special language, ppXML, is derived from XML for modelling platform products, such that different PPD and MC Web services can exchange the information in the common language. prdUDDI and mcPortal provide useful facilities for different groups of users to register, deploy, search and activate their PPD and MC services with the portal. A case study on applying a platform product customization (PPc) Web service is presented to demonstrate how the portal is utilized and to identify what features are important to the users.

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF PARTICIPATION & COORDINATION IN OPEN AND GATED SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITIES.

This article focuses on two questions related to community-based product development: why do participants voluntarily work within and contribute to communities that provide, support, and maintain a public good, and how to large numbers of participants coordinate their work efforts? The article states that main reasons why an individual might participate in a product development community are enjoyment and a need for software. The article discusses the importance of a variety of users and developers, and communication between them, and states that limiting a participant's ability to alter code will result in a decrease in participation.

A hierarchical framework of new products development: an example from biotechnology

Many new products are based on new technologies, which may in turn be based on new scientific discoveries. The extant literature on new product development has focused on how a firm may successfully commercialize new products. There is a corporate cost associated with new product failure, which extends beyond the final product‐manufacturing corporation to all the parties involved in the supply chain for the failed product. The new product development community has developed frameworks for managing the new product development process to minimize new product failure, notably by incorporating customer preferences into a cross‐functional approach to new product design and by creating a set of decision points or stage gates. The focus of these has been on the latter stages of the new product development process. Besides corporate decisions, society and its various institutions play a role in the shaping of new products from knowledge discoveries. Identifies how other participants may indeed influence the development of new products. Permits a more deliberate understanding of the possible impact of aiding or preventing a movement up the development hierarchy and so a clearer understanding of the potential benefits and opportunity costs may arise.