Contingent Product Design and Marketing Strategies Influencing New Product Success and Failure in U.S. and Japanese Electronics Firms

The commercial success or failure of a product doesn't rest solely on the whims of the marketplace. The myriad, often interdependent, strategic trade-offs made throughout the product development process go a long way toward determining whether a product succeeds or fails. The key to success often rests in finding the right combination of product design and market choice decisions. Toward that end, William E. Souder and X. Michael Song examine the relationship between product success and several product design and market choice strategies. In particular, they explore the possibility that the correct strategy combination differs depending on a firm's perception of market uncertainty, which they measure in terms of the respondents' perceived familiarity with the market for a product, perceived understanding of customer needs, and perceived capability to translate those needs into product performance specifications. Recognizing that the correct combination of strategic choices may also depend on firm size, industry, and culture, the study focuses on small U.S. suppliers of electronics components. Fortune 500 producers of electronics final products, and Japanese producers of electronics final products. For the small U.S. firms in the study, an emphasis on performance superiority, technical superiority, or radically new products provides a recipe for failure under low market uncertainty. Even under high market uncertainty, these characteristics do not equate to success for the small U.S. firms in this study. The findings suggest that these firms should focus on design compatibility with a purchaser's installed base. The responses from Fortune 500 firms and Japanese companies indicate that under low market uncertainty these larger organizations should consider emphasizing compatibility and avoiding radical designs. For markets that the larger firms perceive to be highly uncertain, the results suggest that these companies should emphasize performance superiority, technical superiority, and radical designs. The findings related to market choice strategies also support the notion that the correct combination of strategic decisions depends on firm size, culture, and the perceived level of market uncertainty. However, the guidelines presented in this study should not be construed as hard-and-fast rules for formulating product strategy. Instead, the results presented here will be helpful for challenging assumptions and guiding actions, as one element in the effort to shape an effective product strategy.     

Success Through Customer-Driven New Product Development: A Comparison of U.S. and New Zealand Small Entrepreneurial High Technology Firms

Although high-tech, entrepreneurial firms may be small in size, they often play a large role in developing innovative products and thus spurring economic growth. Managers from firms of all sizes may gain useful insights by examining the new-product development (NPD) practices of these small, technology-based firms. And in an era of increasingly global competition, those managers can benefit from understanding the NPD practices of firms from various countries. William Souder, David Buisson, and Tony Garrett contribute to that understanding by describing the results of a study that compares the relative NPD proficiency of small, technology-based firms in the United States and New Zealand. The firms participating in the study (26 from the U.S. and 29 from N.Z.) operate in rapidly growing, highly competitive markets characterized by evolving customer needs. The participating companies share similar goals: creating technically superior products with unique features for emerging markets, with the ultimate goal of becoming the product and market leaders within their respective industries. Despite these similarities, the study reveals several important differences between the U.S. and N.Z. participants. Overall, the N.Z. respondents had higher levels of NPD performance than those of their U.S. counterparts. In particular, the relationship marketing and customer-focused NPD practices of the N.Z. firms set them apart from the U.S. firms. Top-level managers from the N.Z. participants report higher levels of satisfaction than their U.S. counterparts with the results of their NPD efforts. The results of the study indicate that repondents from the two countries differ in terms of the focus of their NPD mangement systems and the manner in which they strive to achieve success. For the U.S. firms in the study, their NPD management systems focus on the characteristics of the project manager. The N.Z. respondents place greater emphasis on marketing skills and NPD proficiencies. The results suggest that the higher levels of NPD performance acheived by the N.Z. firms in the study arise from greater insights into their users' needs, together with better capabilities for acting on those insights.     

The Sources of Risk Spillovers among U.S. REITs: Financial Characteristics and Regional Proximity

In this article, we estimate the risk spillovers among 74 U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) using the state‐dependent sensitivity value‐at‐risk approach. This methodology allows for the quantification of the spillover size as a function of a company's financial condition. We show that the size of risk spillovers is more than twice as large when REITs are in financial distress and find evidence for the impact of geographical proximity. Our results provide new insights concerning the relevance of geographical diversification for REITs and have important implications for the investment and risk management decisions of real estate investors, mortgage lenders, home suppliers and policy makers.     

Divisional Cost of Capital: A Study of Its Use by Major U.S. Firms

The study examines the use of divisional cost of capital by Fortune 1000 companies. Two hundred and ninety eight firms (29.8 percent) responded to the survey. While the concept of weighted average cost of capital is utilized by 85.2 percent of the respondents, less than 50 percent use divisional cost of capital. By using a single firm cut-off criterion for all projects, there is the potential for intrafirm misallocation of capital since projects initiated by high risk divisions are more likely to be accepted because of high returns. Lower return divisions with less risk may be starved for capital when only a single weighted average cost of capital is used. The author also suggests some normative approaches to solve the problem.     

特别提示:美国实施新版玩具标准

近期,美国消费品安全委员会(CPSC)通过了修订的玩具安全标准ASTM F963(2011版),并于2012年6月12日正式实施。新版标准主要增加了玩具基材中8种可溶性金属(锑、砷、铅、钡、镉、铬、汞、硒)的限量;     

Japanese buyers attitudes toward U.S. supply sources

This paper reports the findings of a mail survey of Japanese industrial buyers. Attitudes toward U.S. companies as supply sources were measured. Generally, Japanese buyers hold favorable attitudes but feel that U.S. firms do not practice the marketing concept in their international marketing efforts.     

Supplier relations and management: A survey of Japanese,Japanese-transplant,and U.S. auto plants

This article presents the results of a questionnaire survey sent to a sample of automobile manufacturers in the United States and Japan (including Japanese-managed plants in the United States) during the spring of 1990. The data support observations that Japanese and U.S. practices tend to differ in key areas and Japanese suppliers perform better in dimensions such as quality (defects) and prices (meeting targets, reducing prices over time); and that Japanese-managed auto plants established in the United States have, in general, adopted Japanese practices and receive extremely high levels of quality from Japanese as well as U.S. suppliers. These findings provide evidence that Japanese practices and performance levels are transferable outside Japan and suggest that considerable improvements are possible for U.S. suppliers supplying U.S. auto plants. In addition, the survey indicates that U.S. firms have adopted at least some practices traditionally associated with Japanese firms, apparently reflecting some convergence toward Japanese practices and higher performance levels in supplier management.     

U.S. Financial Services Consolidation: The Case of Corporate Credit Unions

This paper estimates a stochastic cost frontier forU.S. corporate credit unions using call report datafor 1992–1997. The results indicate that corporatecredit unions were 91 percent cost efficient, onaverage, over this period and that institutionspassing a larger percentage of their investments toU.S. Central Credit Union are more cost efficient. However, the economic magnitude of estimatedefficiency gains from investment concentration isfound to be modest. We conclude that the currentthree-tier hierarchical structure for the U.S. creditunion industry is likely to endure.     

Do U.S. Firms Invest Less in Human Resources?: Training in the World Auto Industry

We investigate the common assertion that U.S. firms invest less in human resources than key international competitors, testing four alternative explanations for differences in training effort found in survey data from an international sample of fifty-seven automobile assembly plants. We find the strongest support for the view that the level of training is derived from the requirements of the business/production strategy and the overall “bundle” of human resource policies—beyond training—adopted by the firm.     

Manufacturing and firm performance in technology-intensive industries: U.S. and Japanese DRAM experience

Firm-specific limits on capacity development rates (rates at which firms are able to increase output rate to design capacity) can affect firm performance in important ways, especially for firms involved in technological competition which introduce products relatively early. A simple model in which capacity development rates act in this way is developed and tested using data from semiconductor memory products (DRAMs). These results are used to estimate the ex post impact of increasing U.S. capacity development limits to the higher Japanese levels in the important 64 K DRAM generation.     

Japanese/U.S. technological competitiveness and strategic alliances in the biotechnology industry

This paper analyzes the reasons for Japanese/U.S. collaborations in the biotechnology industry, and considers the question of whether such alliances pose a threat to the North American industry. Japan's technological competitiveness in biotechnology is examined in terms of its strengths and perceived weaknesses. Ways in which Japan is attempting to overcome these weaknesses are identified. As well, the strengths and weaknesses of the North American biotechnology industry are assessed. The paper concludes with recommendations for government and R&D managers on how to preserve U.S. competitiveness. R&D managers must keep abreast of their techno-global competitive environments. While organizations can enter into alliances to improve their competitiveness they must be aware of the dangers of collaboration, and to benefit from their alliances they must enhance their organizational learning. Organizations must be aware of the pitfalls of alliance formation, and any alliance must be viewed in its national context. Last, but not least, managers must be more effective in their management of the processes of technological innovation.     

Cross-Pacific internationalization of R&D by U.S. and Japanese firms

Efforts by MNCs to develop coordinated international R&D networks have taken place from different historical bases of internationalization and in the context of differing trends in the role of R&D within the corporation, as the cross-Pacific R&D investment in leading U.S. and Japanese firms in the electronics industry shows. Japanese firms, although they espouse a strategy of 'localization', are establishing wholly-owned R&D centres in the U.S. with highly specialized technology mandates that to be used by the company must be networked with their parent organizations. U.S. firms rely on joint ventures or wholly-owned labs with a wider array of technologies that face strong pulls to a local orientation. The patterns are somewhat out of line with the models of internationalization each side is espousing.     

Comparing U.S. and Japanese corporate-level operating performance using financial statement data

This study uses financial statement data restated to a similar reporting basis to compare the operating performance of U.S. and Japanese companies, identifying possible strategic and environmental explanations for the differences observed. Comparisons are made for U.S. and Japanese samples as a whole, for groups of Japanese firms (keiretsu v. nonkeiretsu), and for 11 industries. The results show that neither country appears to generate systematically higher profit margins, but that U.S. firms turnover assets other than inventory more quickly and therefore have higher rates of return on assets. More intensive examination of these results suggests that environmental factors, such as cultural or structural differences, are the primary causes of the observed differences in the data analyzed.     

美国企业包装研究与开发过程

提起包装设计,在许多人看来就是外观装潢设计,其实这是一个误区。在欧美发达国家,包装设计包括3个方面,即包装结构设计、包装装潢设计和包装机械设计。由于意识上的偏差,我国很多企业甚至是大型企业更关注的是产品的外观装潢设计,而对保护产品的结构设计却关注不多。其实,结构设计才是产品包装的第一目的。在本期发表的文章中,我们着重介绍包装结构设计,从中了解美国企业产品包装开发流程到包装结构的3D设计,希望我国包装企业能够从中获得启迪。     

Antecedents and Consequences of Information Technology Usage in NPD: A Comparison of Dutch and U.S. Companies*

This study examines information technology (IT) usage for new product development (NPD) in a global context. Specifically, this research seeks to ascertain the factors that influence IT usage and the relationship between IT usage and new product performance in two different countries—the United States and the Netherlands. The interest here is in discovering if, and how, these relationships may be different depending on the country within which the NPD effort is undertaken. Employing a mail survey methodology, the present study uses data from a sample of U.S. practitioner members from the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) and new product managers from Dutch manufacturing companies to examine the effect of IT infrastructure, IT embeddedness, NPD process formalization, colocation, outsourcing of NPD projects, and length of time on the job on the extent of IT usage. The data are also used to explore the impact of IT usage on speed to market and market performance. The results indicate that IT embeddedness and NPD process formalization positively influence IT usage in both the United States and the Netherlands. Colocation and length of time on the job are negatively associated with IT usage only in Dutch firms. Similarly, outsourcing of NPD projects is positively related to IT usage only in U.S. firms. Finally, IT usage has a positive relationship with speed to market in the Netherlands and with market performance in the United States. An important implication of the present study is that IT usage does impact speed to market and market performance, confirming anecdotal evidence. However, these relationships are not the same in each country. Moreover, the antecedents to IT usage also vary by country. Thus, the precursors and consequences of IT usage in NPD are context specific. Another implication of this research is that unless IT is embedded into the NPD process, it is unlikely that the benefits of IT will come to fruition. Finally, this study suggests that as firms use more globally dispersed teams for NPD and outsource more of their development activities, IT usage is likely to increase to facilitate communication and cooperation.     

Strategic action generation: A comparison of emphasis placed on generic competitive methods by U.S. And Japanese managers

The paper identifies similarities and differences in the emphases and patterns that U.S. and Japanese managers attribute to a set of 22 generic competitive methods. It highlights the different ways that Japanese and American managers combine these methods to form general business strategies. Using factor analyses and smallest space analyses, the study shows differences in business strategy patterns between managers in Japan and the U.S. Such differences reflect the organizing principles underlying the strategy approaches in U.S. and Japanese firms. The organizing principle underlying U.S. responses is the desire to find way to differentiate a firm from its competitors. In contrast, the organizing principle underlying Japanese responses is a desire to establish a comprehensive, stable and defensible position. The paper discusses the implications of these results for strategic management and suggests directions for future U.S. and Japanese comparative strategy research.