Rapid technological learning is critical to commercial success in VLSI semiconductor manufacturing. This learning is done through deliberate activities, especially various types of experimentation. Such experiments are vulnerable to confounding by process noise, caused by process variability....

In our prior work on product diffusions in presence of a capacity constraint, we postulated that a firm operating in such an environment should always attempt to fulfill as much of the present demand as is possible with the capacity constraint. In other words, the firm would never have demand...

We use hospital-level discharge data from cardiac patients in California to estimate the effects of focus on operational performance. We examine focus at three distinct levels of the organization--at the firm level, at the operating unit level, and at the process flow level. We find that focus...

The Bass diffusion model is a well-known parametric approach to estimating new product demand trajectory over time. This paper generalizes the Bass model by allowing for a supply constraint. In the presence of a supply constraint, potential customers who are not able to obtain the new product...

We study the demand forecast-sharing process between a buyer of customized production equipment and a set of equipment suppliers. Based on a large data collection we undertook in the semiconductor equipment supply chain, we empirically investigate the relationship between the buyer's forecasting...

Overlapping development activities is widely used to reduce project completion times in product development. However, research on the applicability of the concept in different technological environments remains scarce. So far, very few industry-specific studies have statistically confirmed an...

A major challenge in the creation of custom-designed products lies in the elicitation of customer needs. As customers are frequently unable to accurately articulate their needs, designers typically create one or several prototypes, which they then present to the customer. This process, which we...

An important managerial problem in product design in the extent to which testing activities are carried out in parallel or in series. Parallel testing has the advantage of proceeding more rapidly than serial testing but does not take advantage of the potential for learning between tests, thus...

We present an analytical model of concurrent engineering, where an upstream and a down-stream task are overlapped to minimize time-to-market. The gain from overlapping activities must be weighed against the delay from rework that results from proceeding in parallel based on preliminary...

In a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem--ideas--and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks--the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space,...