To create new products, firms employ a product development process (PDP) to generate new product concepts, to translate the best of these concepts into quality products, and to manage the risks inherent in bringing such new products to the market. A well-designed PDP is necessary to reduce...

A change in government policy can send waves of crippling impacts through the design and development of publicly funded complex engineering systems. Thus it is important for system architects and designers to understand the interaction of policy with their systems, and to strive for policy...

A system dynamics model is developed and run to study the adoption of fiber-to-the-home as a residential broadband technology. Communities that currently do not have broadband in the United States are modeled. This case is of particular interest to U.S. policymakers, but also relevant to other...

We investigate the effectiveness of strategic alternatives that are designed to dampen the cyclicality manifest in the commercial aviation (CA)-related industries. In this research we introduce the conceptual framework of Enterprise of Enterprises (EoE) as an extension and special case of a...

Policies to avert the threat of dangerous climate change focus on stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by drastically reducing anthropogenic emissions of carbon. Such reductions require limiting the use of fossil fuels-which supply the bulk of energy to economic activity, and...

This research demonstrates that sustainable development is a multidimensional concept that should be approached in a transdisciplinary manner. Its objective has been to synthesize and integrate disparate and currently unconnected lines of thought that have not yet been applied in a systematic...

The debate over a policy response to global climate change has been and continues to be deadlocked between 1) the view that the impacts of climate change are too uncertain and so any policy response should be delayed until we learn more, and 2) the view that we cannot wait to resolve the...

The evolution of the architecture of long-lived complex socio-technical systems have important consequences and can happen in unexpected ways. This dissertation explores this question through the study of the architectural evolution of Municipal Electric Utilities (MEUs) and their...