Although the benefits of involving suppliers in new product development (NPD) under technological uncertainty are not unambiguously affirmed, many firms need to involve suppliers under these circumstances anyway as not all technological knowledge resides within the firm. Previous research argues that purchasing fulfils an important role in involving the suppliers in NPD. However, purchasing’s r...

Product launch – an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant – is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North-American automotive plants from years 1999-2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12-15% at the plant level. This translates to ...

This exploratory paper argues that pleasure-oriented product development with manufacturing flexibility is the next challenge of mass customization if seeking pleasure is the nature of mankind. Preferable product style of a fashion trend is widely accepted to visually enhance a product to satisfy today’s consumer demands. Considerable work remains to be done to integrate product styling (proces...

Organizations often encounter problems in the Product Integration process. The difficulties include finding errors at integration related to mismatch between the different components and problems in other parts of the system than the one that was changed. The question is if these problems can be decreased if the awareness of the integration process is increased in other activities. To get bette...

During 1996 and 1997 two empirical investigations into the importance of management of technology (MOT) issues (unresolved MOT problems) were completed. In these studies more than 150 academic and industry participants @om 17 countries evaluated the importance of each MOT issue relative to the others of its study. Each stu~ used a DELPHIIssues Questionnaire methodology which involved multiple q...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how small businesses may deploy a formalised Stage-Gate approach to new product development (NPD). The original Stage-Gate framework was modified to better suit a small business B2B environment in the seafood industry, and was subsequently applied to a small vertically-integrated crab catching, processing and marketing business. Design/metho...

During the past three decades, cost estimation systems have experienced some major technological innovations and paradigm shifts both in industry and academic research. There are numerous papers available reporting on research findings and the techniques used in cost estimation. This paper presents a review of current academic work and an evaluation of the available commercial cost estimation s...

Product/Service Systems have recently grown in manufacturers’ interest. This paper presents an international survey of manufacturers from Sweden, Japan, Italy and Germany. The results show that customer connection and demands along with increased competition were main driving forces for product/service systems. Also, most product/service systems include physical products, maintenance and repair...

The paper presents intrinsic properties of cross-organizational collaboration in shared information spaces and motivates the concept of ambient communities with particular reference to the tourism sector. Our approach is informed by an ethnographic analysis of assembling innovative information-based products for tourists. Qualitative data collection methods combined with online ‘tells’ reveal t...