			Home About us Contact

Product Lines (product + line)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	73%

Selected Abstracts

The evolution of health food: Erewhon bursts the plain brown wrapper

DESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW, Issue 1 2001
Nick Zarkades
From a hand-made look appropriate to the shelves of natural food stores to a more mainstream, supermarket orientation calling out health benefits and natural ingredients, to a brand-focused strategy that emphasizes the breadth and identity of the product line, the packaging for Erewhon natural cereals has,over the past two decades,undergone dramatic transformations. Nick Zarkades, Cynthia Davis, and Charles Verde outline this design metamorphosis and the business decisions driving the changes. [source]

Local Diversity, Human Creativity, and Technological Innovation

GROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2001
Pierre Desrochers
The purpose of this paper is to point out some shortcomings of traditional approaches to the study of "knowledge spillovers" and to suggest an alternative based on how knowledge is actually created and exchanged by individuals. Which regional setting is the best incubator of technological change and economic growth? Is this promoted by regional diversity or specialization of economi activity? This study will include economic analyses of geographically localized "dynamic knowledge externalities, Jacob's externalities, or adding new work to old, industrial classification and technology combination, human creativity, and technology combination through human action and imaginative use of resources. Employees add to, or switch their product line; individuals move from one type of production to another; individuals observe a product/process in another setting and incorporate it; individuals possessing different skills and working for different firms collaborate; and urban diversity and resource collaboration are utilized. It is concluded that problems are solved through the combination of previously unrelated things and that promoting regional specialization at the expense of spontaneously evolved local diversity might be a counter-productive policy. [source]

Organizational evolution of digital signal processing software development

JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE, Issue 4 2006
Susanna Pantsar-Syväniemi
Abstract A base station, as a network element, has become an increasingly software-intensive system. Digital signal processing (DSP) software is hard real-time software that is a part of the software system needed in a base station. This article reports practical experiences related to organizing the development of embedded software in the telecommunication industry, at Nokia Networks. The article introduces the main factors influencing the development of DSP software and also compares the evolutionary process under study with both selected organizational models for a software product line and a multistage model for the software life cycle. We believe it is vitally important to formulate the organization according to the software architecture, and it is essential to have a dedicated development organization with long-term responsibility for the software. History shows that without long-term responsibility, there is no software reuse. In this paper we introduce a new organizational model for product line development. This new hybrid model clarifies long-term responsibilities in large software organizations with hundreds of staff members and formulates the organization according to the software architecture. Our case needs a couple more constraints to keep it in the evolution stage of the software life cycle. Thus, we extend the evolution phase in the multistage model to make it relevant for embedded, hard real-time software. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

A comparison of quality function deployment and conjoint analysis in new product design

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2002
Madeleine E. Pullman
In this work, we compare two product design approaches, quality function deployment (QFD) and conjoint analysis, by applying each to the design of a new all-purpose climbing harness for the beginning/intermediate ability climber that would complement a leading manufacturer's existing product line. While many of the optimal design features were the same under both approaches, the differences allow us to highlight the strengths of each approach. With conjoint analysis, it was easier to compare the most preferred features (i.e., ones that maximized sales) to profit maximizing features and also to develop designs that optimize product line sales or profits. On the other hand, QFD was able to highlight the fact that certain engineering characteristics or design features had both positive and negative aspects. This tradeoff could point the way to "out of the box" solutions. QFD also highlighted the importance of starting explicitly with customer needs, regardless of which method is used. Rather than competing, we view them as complementary approaches that should be conducted simultaneously; each providing feedback to the other. When the two approaches differed on the optimal level or importance of a feature, it appeared that conjoint analysis better captured customers' current preferences for product features while QFD captured what product developers thought would best satisfy customer needs. Looking at the problem through these different lenses provides a useful dialogue that should not be missed. QFD's ability to generate creative or novel solutions should be combined with conjoint analysis' ability to forecast market reaction to design changes. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. [source]

Managing platform architectures and manufacturing processes for nonassembled products

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2002
Marc H. Meyer
The article presents methods for defining product platforms and measuring business performance in process intensive industries. We first show how process intensive product platforms can be defined using the products and processes of a film manufacturer. We then present an empirical method for understanding the dynamics of process intensive platform innovation, allocating engineering and sales data to specific platform and product development efforts within a product family. We applied this method to a major product line of a materials manufacturer. We gathered ten years of engineering and manufacturing cost data and allocated these to successive platforms and products, and then generated R&D performance measures. These data show the dynamic of heavy capital spending relative to product engineering as one might expect in a process intensive industries. The data also show how derivative products can be leveraged from underlying product platforms and processes for nonassembled products. Embedded within these data are strategies for creating reusable subsystems (comprising components, materials, etc.) and common production processes. Hard data on the degree to which subsystems and processes are shared across different products frequently are typically not maintained by corporations for the duration needed to understand the dynamics of evolving product families. For this reason, we developed and applied a second method to assess the degree of reuse of subsystems and processes. This method asks engineering managers to provide subjective ratings on an ordinal scale regarding the use of technology and processes from one product to the next in a cumulative manner. We find that high levels of reuse generally indicate that a product family was developed with a platform discipline. We applied this measure of platform intensity to two product lines of integrated circuits from another large manufacturer. We used this method to gather approximately ten years of information for each product family. Upon analysis, one product family showed substantial platform discipline, emphasizing a common architecture and processes across specific products within the product line. The other product family was developed with significantly less sharing and reuse of architecture, components, and processes. We then found that the platform centric product family outperformed the latter along a number of performance dimensions over the course of the decade under examination. [source]

Multiproduct firm behaviour in a differentiated market

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2003
Eric Giraud-Héraud
We prove existence and explicitly characterize equilibrium when transportation costs are quadratic. We exhibit interesting equilibrium features for price policy, market shares, and profits. In equilibrium, the multiproduct firm uses its connected market shares to build asymmetric pricing schemes that allow a fraction of its product line (brands, stores or firms) to be shielded from outside competition and hence extracts maximum consumer surplus. Our results shed some light on the link between product differentiation and mergers and acquisitions activity (M&As). JEL Classification: D21, L11, L13 Le comportement de l'entreprise multi-produits dans un marché différencié Cet article propose une généralisation du modèle circulaire de différenciation des produits en considérant le cas d'une firme multi-produits en concurrence avec des firmes mono-produit. Nous montrons l'existence d'un équilibre en prix, que nous caractérisons dans le cas de coûts de transports quadratiques. Nous exposons les propriétés de cet équilibre en terme de parts de marchés et de profits obtenus par les entreprises. A l'équilibre, la firme multi-produits utilise ses niches de marché pour mettre en place une tarification asymétrique permettant à une partie de sa ligne de produits d'être protégée de la concurrence et d'extraire le maximum de surplus aux consommateurs. Nous proposons ensuite une discussion sur le lien entre différenciation des produits et activité de fusion et acquisition. [source]

Deaths Between Bedrails and Air Pressure Mattresses

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN GERIATRICS SOCIETY, Issue 6 2002
Steven H. Miles MD
OBJECTIVES: To describe how patients die by becoming trapped between therapeutic air pressure mattresses and bed rails. DESIGN: A retrospective review of all voluntary reports deaths in beds with air mattresses that can be found in the Food and Drug Administration's on-line databases of adverse medical events that cover 1994 to 2001. SETTING: Death reports come from manufacturers, medical staff, and coroners and describe deaths in hospitals, nursing homes, and home care, although type of care site is often not given. MEASUREMENTS: Event descriptions were reviewed to determine how the person became entrapped in the rail and how responsibility for the event was allocated. RESULTS: There were 35 deaths involving many product lines. Twenty-one deaths involved overlay air mattresses placed on top of a regular mattress. Thirteen patients died in beds with built-in air mattresses. Compression of the mattress allowed an off-center person to slide against the rail where reexpansion of the mattress kept the person compressed against the rail. Two patterns were seen. In one, the mattress bunched up behind a person who was lying on the side of the bed, pushing the neck against a bedrail. In the second type, a patient died after sliding off the bed and having the neck or chest compressed between the rail and bed. Manufacturers attributed the deaths to poor clinical decision-making or inadequate monitoring. CONCLUSIONS: Lethal asphyxiation in beds with air pressure mattresses is a variant of bedrail-mattress entrapment that requires redesign by bed manufacturers and risk awareness by clinicians. [source]

Firm, market, and regulatory factors influencing innovation and commercialization in Canada's functional food and nutraceutical sector

AGRIBUSINESS : AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 2 2008
Deepananda Herath
Factors influencing the development and commercialization of functional food and nutraceutical (FFN) products are explored. Count data models are developed to relate firm, market, and regulatory covariates to the number of FFN product lines firms have under development, on the market, and in total. Canadian firm-level innovation data were taken from Statistics Canada (2003) Functional Food and Nutraceutical Survey. Firms involved in product development/scale-up had more product lines in total and on the market. Firms with a strong and positive perception of the impact of regulatory reform related to generic health claims and harmonization of Canadian regulations with U.S. regulations had fewer product lines in total and on the market. Firms with more positive perceptions of the business impact of structure and function health claims had more product lines on the market. One implication of the study is the importance of developing policies and reforming regulations which better enable use of generic health claims on FFN products. Further, policies which better enable or foster development/scale-up of product lines would increase the Canadian FFN sector's ability to develop new products. [EconLit: O130, L500, Q180]. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Incremental Organizational Change in a Transforming Society: Managing Turbulence in Hungary in the 1990s

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 3 2000
Laszlo Czaban
The rapid liberalization of the former state socialist economies of Eastern Europe coupled with privatization were thought by many in the early 1990s likely to generate effective capitalist firms quite quickly. However, the radical institutional transformation and collapse of Soviet markets resulted in considerable uncertainty for most companies which, together with high sunk costs and lack of resources, inhibited organizational restructuring and strategic change. Despite high levels of foreign ownership and control by the mid-1990s, many Hungarian companies continued to produce much the same kinds of products for mostly the same customers with inputs from mostly the same suppliers as in 1990. While most had reduced employment substantially, and many had disposed of ancillary organizational units, the bulk of the companies considered here had not greatly altered their work systems and overall organizational structures. In the few enterprises where the production process had been extensively reorganized by 1996, this was funded and directed by foreign firms who had taken them over. These foreign firm-controlled companies also tended to have new top managers from outside the enterprise. They additionally introduced new products more often than Hungarian firms, albeit within rather narrow product lines that usually dominated the domestic market. Overall, most of the enterprises studied were still doing much the same set of activities in the mid-1990s, though with fewer staff, as at the start of the decade, and privatization per se had not led to major shifts in enterprise structure and strategy, nor did it seem likely to do so in the foreseeable future. [source]

Product line extensions: causes and effects

MANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2008
Article first published online: 27 JUL 200, Kostas Axarloglou
In this paper, and using data from a sample of five US manufacturing industries, we study the implications of market demand growth on product line extensions and the effects of the latter on industry profit margins. Companies extend their product lines in response to expansions in market demand and this tends to depress profit margins in the industry. Finally, these results are quantitatively significant. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The "Income Gap" and the Health of Arts Nonprofits

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, Issue 3 2000
Arthur C. Brooks
This article addresses the widening gap between costs and revenues for many arts nonprofits; it examines the most common explanations for the problem, categorizes possible solutions, and suggests practical strategies for implementation. This study suggests that a critical difference exists between large and small arts firms, which in turn implies a different set of strategies for each. Whereas large organizations do well to leverage technological innovations, diversify product lines, and expand audiences through educational outreach, smaller organizations tend to see greater returns from efforts to expand their philanthropic base. [source]

PRODUCT OFFERING, PRICING, AND MAKE-TO-STOCK/MAKE-TO-ORDER DECISIONS WITH SHARED CAPACITY

PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2002
GREGORY DOBSON
In an era of mass customization, many firms continue to expand their product lines to remain competitive. These broader product lines may help to increase market share and may allow higher prices to be charged, but they also cause challenges associated with diseconomies of scope. To investigate this tradeoff, we considered a monopolist who faces demand curves, which for each of its potential products, decline with both price and response time (time to deliver the product). The firm must decide which products to offer, how to price them, whether each should be make-to-stock (mts) or make-to-order (mto), and how often to produce them. The offered products share a single manufacturing facility. Setup times introduce disceonomies of scope and setup costs introduce economies of scale. We provide motivating problem scenarios, model the monopolist's problem as a non-linear, integer programming problem, characterize of the optimal policy, develop near-optimal procedures, and discuss managerial insights. [source]

Intellectual Property, Architecture, and the Management of Technological Transitions: Evidence from Microsoft Corporation

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2009
Alan MacCormack
Many studies highlight the challenges facing incumbent firms in responding effectively to major technological transitions. Though some authors argue that these challenges can be overcome by firms possessing what have been called dynamic capabilities, little work has described in detail the critical resources that these capabilities leverage or the processes through which these resources accumulate and evolve. This paper explores these issues through an in-depth exploratory case study of one firm that has demonstrated consistently strong performance in an industry that is highly dynamic and uncertain. The focus for the present study is Microsoft, the leading firm in the software industry. The focus on Microsoft is motivated by providing evidence that the firm's product performance has been consistently strong over a period of time in which there have been several major technological transitions,one indicator that a firm possesses dynamic capabilities. This argument is supported by showing that Microsoft's performance when developing new products in response to one of these transitions,the growth of the World Wide Web,was superior to a sample of both incumbents and new entrants. Qualitative data are presented on the roots of Microsoft's dynamic capabilities, focusing on the way that the firm develops, stores, and evolves its intellectual property. Specifically, Microsoft codifies knowledge in the form of software "components," which can be leveraged across multiple product lines over time and accessed by firms developing complementary products. The present paper argues that the process of componentization, the component "libraries" that result, the architectural frameworks that define how these components interact, and the processes through which these components are evolved to address environmental changes represent critical resources that enable the firm to respond to major technological transitions. These arguments are illustrated by describing Microsoft's response to two major technological transitions. [source]

Organizing for Radical Innovation: An Exploratory Study of the Structural Aspects of RI Management Systems in Large Established Firms

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 6 2006
Gina Colarelli O'Connor
To escape the intense competition of today's global economy, large established organizations seek growth options beyond conventional new product development that leads to incremental changes in current product lines. Radical innovation (RI) is one such pathway, which results in organically driven growth through the creation of whole new lines of business that bring new to the world performance features to the market and may result in the creation of entirely new markets. Yet success is elusive, as many have experienced and scholars have documented. This article reports results of a three-year, longitudinal study of 12 large established firms that have declared a strategic intent to evolve their RI capabilities. In contrast to other academic research that has analyzed specific projects to understand management practices appropriate for RI, the present research reported explores the evolution of management systems for enabling radical innovation to occur repeatedly in large firms and reports on one aspect of this management system: organizational structures for enabling and nurturing RI. To consider organizational structure as a venue for capability development is new in the management of innovation and dynamic capabilities literatures. Conventional wisdom holds that RIs should be incubated outside the company and assimilated once they have gained traction in the marketplace. Numerous experiments with organizational structures were observed that instead work to manage the interfaces between the RI management system and the mother organization. These structures are described here, and insights are drawn out regarding radical innovation competency requirements, transition challenges, senior leadership mandates, and business-unit ambidexterity. The centerpiece of this research is the explication of the Discovery,Incubation,Acceleration framework, which details three sets of necessary, though not sufficient competencies, for building an RI capability. [source]

Efficient versus Responsive Supply Chain Choice: An Empirical Examination of Influential Factors

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 6 2003
Taylor R. Randall
Contemporary strategies in operations management suggest that successful firms align supply chain assets with product demand characteristics in order to exploit the profit potential of product lines fully. However, observation suggests that supply chain assets often are longer lived than product line decisions. This suggests that alignment between supply chain assets and demand characteristics is most likely to occur at the time of initial market entry. This article examines the association between product demand characteristics and the initial investment in a supply chain at the time of market entry. We characterize supply chains as responsive or efficient. A responsive supply chain is distinguished by short production lead-times, low set-up costs, and small batch sizes that allow the responsive firm to adapt quickly to market demand, but often at a higher unit cost. An efficient supply chain is distinguished by longer production lead-times, high set-up costs, and larger batch sizes that allow the efficient firm to produce at a low unit cost, but often at the expense of market responsiveness. We hypothesize that a firm's choice of responsive supply chain will be associated with lower industry growth rates, higher contribution margins, higher product variety, and higher demand or technological uncertainty. We further hypothesize that interactions among these variables either can reinforce or can temper the main effects. We report that lower industry growth rates are associated with responsive market entry, but this effect is offset if growth occurs during periods of high variety and high demand uncertainty. We report that higher contribution margins are associated with responsive market entry and that this effect is more pronounced when occurring with periods of high variety. Finally, we report that responsive market entry also is correlated positively with higher technological demand uncertainty. These results are found using data from the North American mountain bike industry. [source]