Coordination among many interdependent actors in complex product development projects is recognized as a key activity in organizational theory. It is well known that this coordination becomes progressively more difficult with project size, but we do not yet sufficiently understand whether this...

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...

Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain R...D projects, as management can repeatedly gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. This value is now well accepted and referred to as "real...

Supply chain contracting literature has traditionally focused on aligning incentives for economically rational players. Recent work has hypothesized that social preferences, as distinct from economic incentives, may influence behavior in supply chain transactions. Social preferences refer to...

Companies innovating in dynamic environments face the combined challenge of unforeseeable uncertainty (the inability to recognize the relevant influence variables and their functional relationships; thus, events and actions cannot be planned ahead of time) and high complexity (large number of...

We present an evolutionary model of technology diffusion in which an old and a new technology are available, both of which improve their performance incrementally over time. Technology adopters make repeated choices between the established and the new technology based on their perceived...

Selecting program portfolios within a budget constraint is an important challenge in the management of new product development (NPD). Optimal portfolios are difficult to define because of the combinatorial complexity of project combinations. However, at the aggregate level of the strategic...