The discipline of project management adheres to the dominant model of the project life cycle, or the phased stage-gate approach, of executing projects. This implies a clear definition of mission and system at the outset (to reduce uncertainty), and subsequent execution in phases with decision...

It is becoming increasingly common to involve external technology providers in developing new technologies and new products. Two important phases involved in working with technology vendors are vendor selection and vendor management. Since for both steps theory development of key decision...

We examine how the architecture of products relates to their quality. Using an architectural representation that accounts for both the hierarchical and dependency relationships between modules and components, we define a new construct, system cyclicality. System cyclicality recognizes component...

It is well established that accounting based incentive schemes can induce managers to adapt their behavior to manipulate accounting metrics even if such behavior is not in the best interest of the firm. Using a parsimonious model, this paper establishes how common accounting based bonus schemes...

This paper examines the impact of architectural decisions on the level of defects in a product. We view products as collections of components linked together to work as an integrated whole. Previous work has established modularity (how decoupled a component is from other product components) as a...

Contests, in which contestants compete at their own expenses for prizes offered by a contest holder, have become the foundational primitive of many theories of competition. Recently, the focus in contest research has turned to the role of in-contest performance feedback. The extant literature on...

Problem Definition. Most industrial innovations consist of multiple interacting components that must be combined into a final product to form an integrated system. When procuring such complex innovations from their suppliers, buyers face a substantial challenge: Should they tender the integrated...

This paper introduces an approach to identify styles in product designs. We first built a theoretical foundation on what a style is and how designs are configured into styles. On this basis we executed a graph-clustering algorithm to identify styles in a population of design patents filed in the...

Creative stars make disproportionately influential contributions to their fields. Yet we know little about how an innovator’s creative performance is affected by collaborating with stars. This paper studies the creative aspects of interpersonal collaboration from a new perspective: the quality...

Problem Definition: Is teamwork better than working alone for creating breakthrough inventions? We challenge the widely accepted affirmative answer to this question.Academic/Practical Relevance: Extant research has consistently found that lone inventors significantly underperform teams in...