Empirical research has demonstrated that a market orientation has in general a positive effect on organizational performance. The potential benefits of a market orientation have, however, not been realized because academics and practitioners do not yet understand the modus operandi that transform market orientation into superior organizational performance. Recent research has demonstrated that ...

The primary role of marketing within the competitive advantage is innovation. The customer value-based differentiation strategies will drive the company’s market research efforts, its selection of target markets, its product development processes, its market communications programs, and its delivery processes. These processes require many specific capabilities that enable the firm to carry out ...

The replacement of an existing product with a new one presents many challenges. In particular, uncertainties in a new product introduction often lead to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. This paper addresses inventory planning decisions for product upgrades when there is no replenishment opportunity during the transition period. We allow product substitution: when a company runs ou...

The fundamental characteristics of a configure-to-order (CTO) product is illustrated in this research with the view to reduce the time to market and offering more product variants with highest customer satisfaction. In this paper, we have formulated various aspects of configuration process in terms of customer view, designer view and production process view. All these three views are demonstrat...

Lead user driven innovation and open innovation paradigms seek to involve consumers and common people to innovative product development projects. In order to help developers choose ideas that meet the end users’ needs, we undertook a massive collaborative research effort and collected 40,000 ideas from 2,150 common people about future mobile services that they would like to use. We inspired eac...

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...