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Product Life Cycle (product + life_cycle)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	58%

Selected Abstracts

Process and product innovation: A differential game approach to product life cycle

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 2 2010
Luca Lambertini
C73; D43; D92; O31 We investigate the timing of adoption of product and process innovation using a differential game where firms may invest in both activities. We consider horizontal product innovation that reduces product substitutability, and process innovation that reduces marginal cost. First, we demonstrate that the incentive for cost-reducing investment is relatively higher than the incentive to increase product differentiation. Second, depending on initial conditions: (i) firms activate both types of investment from the very outset to the steady state; (ii) firms initially invest in only one R&D activity and then reach the steady state either carrying out only this activity or carrying out both; or (iii) firms do not invest at all in either type of innovation. Comparing R&D investments under Cournot and Bertrand behavior shows that quantity competition entails lower R&D incentives than price competition in both directions. [source]

Hierarchical Activity Model for Risk-Based Decision Making

JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 6 2009
Integrating Life Cycle, Plant-Specific Risk Assessments
Summary For the practical implementation of the assessment of environmental impact, actual procedures and data requirements should be clarified so that industrial decision makers understand them. Researchers should consider local risks related to processes and environmental impact throughout the life cycle of products simultaneously to supervise these adverse effects appropriately. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool for quantifying the potential impact associated with a product life cycle. Risk assessment (RA) is a widely used tool for identifying chemical risks in a specific situation. In this study, we integrate LCA and RA for risk-based decision making by devising a hierarchical activity model using the type-zero method of integrated definition language (IDEF0). The IDEF0 activity modeling language has been applied to connect activities with information flows. Process generation, evaluation, and decision making are logically defined and visualized in the activity model with the required information. The activities, information flows, and their acquisitions are revealed, with a focus on which data should be collected by on-site engineers. A case study is conducted on designing a metal cleaning process reducing chemical risks due to the use of a cleansing agent. LCA and RA are executed and applied effectively on the basis of integrated objective settings and interpretation. The proposed activity model can be used as a foundation to incorporate such assessments into actual business models. [source]

Hazard Reduction in Nanotechnology

JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 3 2008
Lucas Reijnders
Summary The release of hazardous substances is a matter of concern for nanotechnology. This may include some nanoparticles, reactants, by-products, and solvents. The use of low-hazard solvents may reduce the hazards from nanoparticle production and nanomaterial processing. The hazards of inorganic nanoparticles may be reduced by modifying their chemical composition, surface characteristics, or structure. In nanomedicine, optimizing the balance between persistence and excretion and preventing the release of toxic degradation products may reduce hazard. In applications of fixed inorganic nanoparticles, the focus should be on preventing the release of such particles and of hazardous compounds during the product life cycle. When, after exhaustion of known hazard reduction options, significant hazard remains, other approaches merit consideration. [source]

Contractual agreements for coordination and vendor-managed delivery under explicit transportation considerations

NAVAL RESEARCH LOGISTICS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 5 2006
egül Toptal
Abstract We consider the coordination problem between a vendor and a buyer operating under generalized replenishment costs that include fixed costs as well as stepwise freight costs. We study the stochastic demand, single-period setting where the buyer must decide on the order quantity to satisfy random demand for a single item with a short product life cycle. The full order for the cycle is placed before the cycle begins and no additional orders are accepted by the vendor. Due to the nonrecurring nature of the problem, the vendor's replenishment quantity is determined by the buyer's order quantity. Consequently, by using an appropriate pricing schedule to influence the buyer's ordering behavior, there is an opportunity for the vendor to achieve substantial savings from transportation expenses, which are represented in the generalized replenishment cost function. For the problem of interest, we prove that the vendor's expected profit is not increasing in buyer's order quantity. Therefore, unlike the earlier work in the area, it is not necessarily profitable for the vendor to encourage larger order quantities. Using this nontraditional result, we demonstrate that the concept of economies of scale may or may not work by identifying the cases where the vendor can increase his/her profits either by increasing or decreasing the buyer's order quantity. We prove useful properties of the expected profit functions in the centralized and decentralized models of the problem, and we utilize these properties to develop alternative incentive schemes for win,win solutions. Our analysis allows us to quantify the value of coordination and, hence, to identify additional opportunities for the vendor to improve his/her profits by potentially turning a nonprofitable transaction into a profitable one through the use of an appropriate tariff schedule or a vendor-managed delivery contract. We demonstrate that financial gain associated with these opportunities is truly tangible under a vendor-managed delivery arrangement that potentially improves the centralized solution. Although we take the viewpoint of supply chain coordination and our goal is to provide insights about the effect of transportation considerations on the channel coordination objective and contractual agreements, the paper also contributes to the literature by analyzing and developing efficient approaches for solving the centralized problem with stepwise freight costs in the single-period setting. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006 [source]

The Architecture Improvement Method: cost management and systemic learning about strategic product architectures

R & D MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2007
Petra C. De Weerd-Nederhof
The architecture improvement method (AIM) is a method for multidisciplinary product architecture improvement, addressing uncertainty and complexity and incorporating feedback loops, facilitating trade-off decision making during the architecture creation process. The research reported in this paper demonstrates the ability of the AIM to contribute to cost management and systemic learning in the creation of strategic product architectures, throughout the entire product life cycle. Application of the method in five case studies within two divisions of Royal Philips Electronics shows that in cases of medium uncertainty, substantial cost management benefits can be achieved and that the AIM facilitates systemic learning through the accumulation of architectural competence, thus facilitating organizational memory. [source]

Does Entry Size Matter?

THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2001
Technology on Firm Survival, The Impact of the Life Cycle
A wave of empirical studies has recently emerged showing that smaller-scale entry is confronted with a lower likelihood of survival than their larger counterparts. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the relationship between size of a firm when entering an industry and the likelihood of survival holds under different technological conditions and across the different stages of the industry life cycle. The empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between firm size and the likelihood of survival is shaped by technology and the stage of the industry life cycle. While the likelihood of survival confronting small entrants is generally less than that confronting their larger counterparts, the relationship does not hold for mature stages of the product life cycle, or in technologically intensive products. In mature industries that are still technologically intensive, entry may be less about radical innovation and possibly more about filling strategic niches, thus negating the impact of entry size on the likelihood of survival. [source]

What about Design Newness?

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 6 2009
Investigating the Relevance of a Neglected Dimension of Product Innovativeness
In several industries, new products are very similar in functional features but compete on their unique design. Firms like Alessi, Apple, Bang & Olufsen, Dyson, or Kartell all follow a design-driven innovation approach and use their products' visual appearance as the main mean for differentiation. In spite of this, design newness is never discussed among the dimensions of product innovativeness. Instead, conceptualizations of product innovativeness mostly focus on a product's technical newness or the changes it implies for the innovating firm or for the market it enters. This paper seeks to build an argument for why design newness should be considered as a dimension of product innovativeness. In addition to providing conceptual rationale, empirical evidence is offered on the influence of design newness on sales performance across a product's life cycle. To be able to put the findings into perspective, the performance effects of design newness are compared with those of technical newness. As several products exemplify that design newness and technical newness can go hand in hand, not only direct performance effects but also interaction effects between both newness dimensions are investigated. The arguments are tested on a sample of 157 new cars launched between 1978 and 2006 in Germany. The automobile industry is selected because of the strategic role of both technical and design aspects in product innovation. Putting a focus on this industry also has the advantage that historical information on car specifics and objective sales data over time are accessible. The results emphasize that both design and technical newness are important drivers of car sales. However, the effects differ widely across the product life cycle. While design newness has a positive impact right after the introduction and persists in strength over time, technical newness drives sales with a lagged effect and decreases toward the end of the life cycle. The test of a combined influence of design newness and technical newness on sales performance produces no significant results. These results open interesting avenues for future research on product innovativeness in general and design newness in particular. For management practice, the findings emphasize the importance of overall product innovativeness, clarify the different performance effects of design and technical newness across the product life cycle, and show the value of creating a unique visual product appearance to positively trigger product diffusion. [source]

Interfirm Innovation under Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence for Strategic Knowledge Partitioning,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2008
Jaegul Lee
This paper analyzes how uncertainty and life-cycle effects condition the knowledge boundary between assemblers and suppliers in interfirm product development. Patents associated with automotive emission control technologies for both assemblers and suppliers are categorized as architectural or component innovations, and technology-forcing regulations imposed by the government on the auto industry from 1970 to 1998 are used to define periods of high and low uncertainty. Results confirm that suppliers dominate component innovation whereas assemblers lead on architectural innovation. More importantly, when facing uncertainty firms adjust their knowledge boundary by increasing the knowledge overlap with their supply-chain collaborators. Suppliers clearly expand their knowledge base relatively more into architectural knowledge during such periods. But assemblers' greater emphasis on component innovation in periods of greater uncertainty is only true as a relative deviation from an overall trend toward increasing component innovation over time. This trend results from an observed life-cycle effect, whereby architectural innovation dominates before the emergence of a dominant design, with component innovation taking the lead afterward. Thus, for assemblers life-cycle effects may dominate over task uncertainty in determining relative effort in component versus architectural innovation. This work extends research on strategic interfirm knowledge partitioning as well as on the information-processing view of product development. First, it provides a large-scale empirical justification for the claim that firms' knowledge boundaries need to extend beyond their task boundaries. Further, it implies that overlaps in knowledge domains between an assembler and suppliers are particularly important for projects involving new technologies. Second, it offers a dynamic view of knowledge partitioning, showing how architectural knowledge prevails in the early phase of the product life cycle whereas component knowledge dominates the later stages. Yet the importance of life-cycle effects versus task uncertainty in conditioning knowledge boundaries is different for assemblers and suppliers, with the former dominating for assemblers and the latter more influential for suppliers. Finally, it supports the idea that architectural and component knowledge are critical elements in the alignment of cognitive frameworks between assemblers and suppliers and thus are key for information-exchange effectiveness and resolution of task uncertainties in interfirm innovation. [source]

An Evaluation of Flexible Workday Policies in Job Shops,

DECISION SCIENCES, Issue 2 2002
Kum-Khiong Yang
ABSTRACT Job shops have long faced pressures for improvement in a challenging and volatile environment. Today's trends of global competition and shortening of product life cycles suggest that both the challenges and the intensity of market volatility will only increase. Consequently, the study of tactics for maximizing the flexibility and responsiveness of a job shop is important. Indeed, there is a significant body of literature that has produced guidelines on when and how to deploy tactics such as alternate routings for jobs and transfers of cross-trained workers between machines. In this paper we consider a different tactic by adjusting the length of workdays. Hours in excess of a 40-hour week are exchanged for compensatory time off at time and a half, and the total amount of accrued compensatory time is limited to no more than 160 hours in accordance with pending legislation. We propose several simple flexible workday policies that are based on an input/output control approach and investigate their performance in a simulated job shop. We find significant gains in performance over a fixed schedule of eight hours per day. Our results also provide insights into the selection of policy parameters. [source]

A Web-enabled product definition and customization system for product conceptualization

EXPERT SYSTEMS, Issue 5 2005
Wei Yan
Abstract: Owing to rapidly changing customer needs and much shorter product life cycles, for developing a successful product it is imperative to employ more efficient and flexible approaches for product conceptualization. To meet this demand, a Web-enabled product definition and customization system (PDCS) is proposed, from a design-knowledge-handling viewpoint, in this paper. It comprises two phases, namely product definition based on the laddering technique and a novel design knowledge hierarchy, and product customization based on an integrated methodology of conjoint analysis and Kohonen association techniques. Basically, this system is a method of conducting design decision-making via customer involvement, i.e. a strategy for transforming customer preference into a specific product concept. A case study on wood golf club design is used to illustrate and validate the proposed Web-enabled PDCS. [source]

Virtuelle Produktmodellierung am Beispiel eines Pumpenlaufrades

CHEMIE-INGENIEUR-TECHNIK (CIT), Issue 1-2 2003
F.-K. Benra Dr.-Ing.
Abstract Durch die Verkürzung der Produktlebenszyklen werden die zur Verfügung stehenden Entwicklungszeiten entscheidend eingeschränkt. Es bleibt keine Zeit mehr für ein umfangreiches Erprobungsprogramm, bei dem die gewünschten Produkteigenschaften durch die Untersuchung und Abwandlung diverser Prototypen erzielt werden. Durch konsequenten Einsatz virtueller Techniken ist die Simulation der geforderten Produkteigenschaften und des Herstellungsprozesses möglich. Das Ergebnis einer so aufgebauten CAx-Prozesskette ist eine vollständige, durchgängig rechnerintegrierte Bauteilentwicklung. In diesem Beitrag wird ein derartiger Produktentstehungsprozess am Beispiel eines Kreiselpumpenlaufrades detailliert beschrieben. Durch die Schaffung eines Anwendungssystems für die Berechnung, Konstruktion und Fertigung von Pumpenlaufrädern lässt sich der Entwicklungsprozess enorm verkürzen. Gleichzeitig ist damit eine wesentliche Senkung der Entwicklungskosten für ein äußerst effektives und zuverlässiges Produkt verbunden. Virtual Modeling of Products with a Centrifugal Pump Impeller as an Example Shortening of the product life cycles means less time for the development of a technical product. There is no more time for an extensive testing program to obtain the desired product properties by investigation and modification of various prototypes. By careful application of virtual techniques the simulation of the required product properties and the production process is possible. The result of a CAx-System is a complete computer-integrated construction unit development. In this contribution the product developing process is described in detail for a centrifugal pump impeller. The creation of an application system for the computation, construction and manufacturing of pump impellers shortens the development process enormously. At the same time the development costs for an extremely effective and reliable product become substantially lower. [source]