Adoption of Product and Process Innovations in Differentiated Markets: The Impact of Competition

The paper examines the effects of the degree of competition on firms'decisions to innovate in differentiated markets. Firms favor productinnovations if they produce close substitutes (so competition is severe) andfavor process innovations if products are differentiated (so competition isless severe). Assumptions on the strategic complementarity of product andprocess innovations and on the decreasing returns of a product innovationare found to be the critical assumptions in the sense of Milgrom and Roberts (1994).     

Market Adaptation as a Process in the Product Life Cycle of Radical Innovations and High Technology Products

Sales for radically new products often depend on the development of an associated infrastructure. This is particularly true in the case of hightechnology innovations. This infrastructure reflects society's and/or industry's adaptation to the new product's potential or capability. Supportive infrastructure developments can hasten product growth in early stages of the product life cycle or retard growth in their absence. Shelby McIntyre shares his thoughts about the role of infrastructure in this perspective and presents useful guidelines for evaluating its impact. A radical innovation lives or dies, in part, by a company's vision and commitment to developing its long term potential. It is in this sense that a product or innovation can be "ahead of its time" (i.e., ahead of its infrastructure).     

Product Development as Core Competence: How Formal Product Development Practices Differ for Radical,More Innovative,and Incremental Product Innovations

Although universally recognized as an important consideration in building product development (PD) competency, the effect of a firm's ability to vary its PD practices to develop winning products has been given scant attention in large‐scale, multiorganizational, quantitative studies. This research explores differences in formal new PD practices among three project types—incremental, more innovative, and radical. Using a sample of 380 business units, this research investigates how development practices differ across these three classes of innovation with respect to the formal PD process, project organization, PD strategy, organizational culture, and senior management commitment. Our results diverge from several commonly held beliefs about formal PD processes and the management of radical versus incremental innovations. Our results indicate that radical projects are managed less flexibly than incremental projects. Instead of being an offshoot of less strategic planning, radical projects are just as strategically aligned as incremental projects. Instead of being informally introduced entrepreneurial adventures, radical projects are often the result of more formal ideation methods. While these results may be counterintuitive to suppositional models of how to radical innovation happens, it is the central theme of this research to show how radical innovation actually happens. Our findings also provide a foundation for reexamining the role of control in the management of innovation. As the level of innovativeness increased, so too did the amount of controls imposed—e.g., less flexibility in the development process, more professional, full‐time project leadership, centralized executive oversight for new products, and formal financial assessments of expected NP performance.     

Predictors of the Survival of Innovations*

This article examines the impact of key success factors on the survival of innovations that have reached the market and were developed by inventors outside of established organizations. It is of interest to learn which characteristics predict, at an early stage, the duration of the innovation's length of sales, because this duration is important to the financial success of new products. A focus on survival also can contribute conceptual clarity to the study of new product development. This study uses the Inventor's Assistance Program (IAP) at the Canadian Innovation Centre (CIC) in Waterloo, Canada, as the source of data. The CIC is a not‐for‐profit agency that provides various services to foster business development involving innovative products and services. Analysts in the IAP evaluate a specific product idea or invention on 37 dimensions before it has reached the market. The data for the present study involved these 37 variables evaluated each with a three‐point linguistic scale. As the evaluations of the criteria are subjective, they might be argued to contain inaccuracies compared to objective data. On the other hand, the analysts use multiple related measures of concepts that have been shown to increase predictive accuracy. The use of experts who are unrelated to the projects avoids decision‐making biases potentially associated with project managers' assessment of their own projects, such as unrealistic optimism. The recording of the expert evaluations of the ideas before they reached the market and independent of the measure of success, rather than using post‐project completion evaluations, eliminates measurement biases such as hindsight bias and common method variance bias. Identifying information was used in these records to conduct a telephone survey of the inventors. An exploratory method of data analysis is identified and used that distinguishes research‐appropriate constructs and their indicators in these data. Cluster analysis was performed, and survival regression correlated cluster scores with survival. Three variables were found to significantly affect survival: anticipated stable demand, price required for profitability, and technical product maturity. In addition, the degree of competition had a marginally significant effect. Because these variables can be assessed at an early stage of an inventions' development, the expected survival time for a specific invention may be computed by entering these assessment values into the described survival model. Then this and other information may be used to compute the expected return of an invention.     

Delineating Design Factors that Influence the Global Product Launch Process*

Preparing for and managing the global product launch process offers unique challenges as each targeted country can pose unique differences across the design categories of channel parameters, country mores, language and colloquialisms, and technology infrastructure. Though not an exhaustive list, these have a predominant influence on the global product launch process on a per‐global‐region basis. Using a case‐study methodology, this article draws on the global product launch experiences of two firms, showing that such influences preclude use of a mass‐marketing, standardization approach. Though it appears that certain elements of global product launch may be standardized for purposes of efficiencies, a global product launch appears to require at least some degree of customization. Such thinking parallels a design perspective, which mandates a tailoring of product and marketing mix to encourage early acceptance within the intended global market. To suggest when customization should be employed, four design categories of channel parameters—country mores, language and colloquialisms, and technology infrastructure—appear to have strong propensity to dictate customized design requirements for a worldwide launch, where greater differences across these design categories would mandate more customization toward each respective global region. Post hoc comments by managers in the focal case studies support this and further delineate that these four design factors necessitate keen consideration in the course of planning and enacting activities during the global product launch process. The two cases studies especially show that customized design decisions will likely pertain to launch schedule due to local retailers' calendars, product aesthetics due to local consumer preferences, point‐of‐sale and other marketing communications due to language requirements, and technology enhancements in light of local market acceptability and both social and regulatory expectations. Managers involved in planning a global product launch should therefore heed channel owners—brand owners, retailers, and distributors—so that they give preference to, promote, and sell the respective company's product relative to competitors' products. To assist toward securing such preference status, channel owners should have a role in advising the timing of launch and design considerations (e.g., color and form). Logistic issues, such as delivery and after‐sales support via this channel, are keen considerations as well. Logistics has to be thought through to ensure that demand can be met across all regions for a new product. And with the growing prevalence of Internet worldwide, managers must pay keen attention to cultural references and language used on any Internet site to ensure that the product is properly represented and promoted during its global launch. The process of a global product launch is therefore more than the company's ability to gain access to a particular market; it is the company's ability to understand key design issues per each global region respectively and to respond to pressing global region differences by customizing the total product offering to meet the needs of that global region.     

Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process in New Product Screening

The initial screening of a new product idea is critically important. Risky projects (i.e., those with high probabilities of failure) need to be eliminated early before significant investments are made and opportunity costs incurred. Unfortunately, previous research suggests that it is often difficult for managers to "kill" new product development projects once they have begun. Furthermore, recent studies (including some centering on PDMA members) suggest there is much room for improving new product screening, because this decision often is taken informally or unsystematically. Whereas tools such as Cooper's NewProd software are available to aid in the screening decision, management science decision support models for screening are not used frequently. In the present study, the authors illustrate the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a decision support model to aid managers in selecting new product ideas to pursue. The need for flexible models that are highly customized to each firm's challenges (such as AHP) to support the screening decision and to generate knowledge that will be used as input for a firm's expert support system is emphasized. The authors then present an in-depth example of an actual application of AHP in new product screening and discuss the usefulness of this process in gathering and processing knowledge for making new product screening decisions. Finally, the authors explain how a customized AHP process can be incorporated into a sophisticated information system or used as standalone support. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.     

Using Exploratory and Exploitative Market Learning for New Product Development*

While the need for research on the market‐learning efforts of a firm in relation to its new product development is continuously emphasized, the empirical results on this issue reported so far have been mixed. The current study contends that the inconclusive nature of the empirical evidence is mostly due to the existence of different dimensions of organizational market learning—exploratory and exploitative—and to possible different routes by which these learning dimensions are linked to new product performance. More specifically, this study argues that exploratory market learning contributes to the differentiation of the new product because it involves the firm's learning about uncertain and new opportunities through the acquisition of knowledge distant from existing organizational skills and experiences. By contrast, this study posits that exploitative market learning enhances cost efficiency in developing new products as it aims to best use the currently available market information that is closely related to existing organizational experience. This study provides empirical support for this two‐dimensional scheme of organizational market learning and its consequent effects on two components of new product advantage: new product differentiation and cost efficiency. Further, given that the effectiveness of firms' strategic efforts is contingent upon the nature of the market environment, the current study examines the moderating effects of environmental dynamism and market competitiveness for this market learning—new product advantage relationship. This study is based on survey data from 157 manufacturing firms in China that encompass various industries. The empirical findings support the two‐dimensional market learning efforts that increase new product differentiation and cost efficiency, respectively. The study confirms that exploratory market learning becomes more effective under a turbulent market environment and that exploitative market learning is more contributive when competitive intensity is high. It also suggests that because of their differential direct and moderating effects on new product advantage either exploratory or exploitative market learning may not be used exclusively, but the two should be implemented in parallel. Such learning implementations will help to secure both the feature and cost‐based new product advantage components and will consequently lead to the new product success. The current study attempts to contribute to greater clarity and better understanding of how market learning influences new product success as it theoretically identifies and empirically validates the two forms of new product advantage as the conceptual mediator between market learning and new product performance.     

Adoption of Technologically Based Innovations: The Neglected Role of Bounded Rationality

The purpose of this research is to examine the possibility of distinguishing between adopters and nonadopters when conceptualizing the drivers of the decision to adopt technologically based innovations. A second research objective is to examine factorial validity through the assessment of the explanatory power of the investigated conceptualization. In the pursuit of these objectives, the theory of bounded rationality represents the underlying theoretical framework, and Internet banking (IB) represents the nomological framework, in which two alternative conceptualizations, one for IB adopters and a second for nonadopters, are considered. “Intention to adopt” and “adoption” are the criterion variables, respectively. To meet the objectives of the study, two different populations are examined: adopters of IB and nonadopters. The former was used to examine the hypothesized framework for predictive validity against actual adoption; the latter was used to examine the predictive validity regarding intention to adopt. To collect data from IB adopters, the four leading banks, which account for approximately 73% of adopters, agreed to place a link to a Web‐based questionnaire at the log‐in page of their IB system inviting customers to participate in the study. Through this process, 858 useable questionnaires were produced. To reach the nonadopters population, a convenience sample of executive M.B.A. students from two leading Greek universities was employed. Respondents from this sample were screened to ensure that they had never used IB. This process yielded 418 useable questionnaires from the nonadopters population. A major finding from this investigation is that the decision to adopt improves the understanding of adopters regarding the benefits delivered by an innovation. Consequently, they hold a precise, less ambiguous perception of how specific innovation attributes translate into benefits. Hence, when recalling the decision process through which they adopted an innovation, adopters relate specific innovation attributes, including specific benefits received. This situation is displayed in the ability of a direct, first‐order model to capture the relationships between specific innovation attributes and the adoption decision. In contrast, nonadopters, having no direct experience with the innovation, lack this familiarity. They require a significantly greater amount of information in order to associate innovation attributes with potential benefits. The intangibility of technologically based service innovation further increases a nonadopter's need for information. However, this increased need for information renders nonadopters subject to cognitive strain, which causes them to aggregate innovation attributes into more abstract constructs. That aggregation was displayed in the ability of a second‐order model to capture the relationships between specific innovation attributes and the nonadopters' intention to adopt the innovation in the future. In both occasions though, the instrumental drivers of adoption represent the most powerful explicators of the adoption decision. From a practitioner's perspective, this study shows that managers can structure the content of their communication to facilitate the rise of societal drivers, but they should avoid relying on such elements to quicken the pace of the adoption rate. Rather, at the core of communication campaigns, practitioners should place brief and clear claims demonstrating the instrumental arguments in favor of the adoption decision.     

Clarity in Defining Product Design: Inspiring Research Opportunities for the Design Process*

The author argues that given the holistic, cross‐functional, and unique nature of the process of product design, more research is needed to understand product design teams. Specifically, future research should address internal processes cultivated within the product design team, macro influences in the product design environment, and the definition of product design team membership.     

"Forced" Adoption of Innovations in Organizations: Consequences and Implications

Once organizations adopt an innovation, they may force various individuals to use it. While researchers have frequently studied perspectives of suppliers and their customers, they have sometimes neglected the important roles of those who must use the innovation when it is provided to them. S. Ram and Hyung-Shik Jung report results of their investigation of organizational members' responses when they are forced to adopt an innovation. The results suggest that even innovative individuals resist the innovation in the context of forced adoption. Product trial and repetitive usage significantly reduce innovation resistance and create favorable post-adoption evaluation (attitude and satisfaction judgments). Individuals who perceive themselves to have technical competence offer less resistance to the innovation. Further, organizational members deal with forced adoption through the use of coping mechanisms such as complaining and seeking peer help.     

Coordination of Design Supply Chains for Bundling Physical and Software Products*

Research on product development management has concentrated on physical products or on software, but not both. This article explores a special new product development (NPD) approach in which the internal development of core physical products is augmented by bundled and largely outsourced software features. We studied a medical device producer that has established a new medical information product group (MIPG) within their NPD organization to create software features that are bundled with their core physical products. The MIPG has conceptualized these software features as multiple software development projects, and then coordinated their realization largely through the use of external software suppliers. This case study centers on the question: how can firms effectively coordinate such product development processes? Our analysis of case evidence and related literature suggests that such product bundling processes, when pursued through design supply chains (DSC), are more complex than is typical for the development of streams of either physical products or software products individually. We observe that DSC coordination transcends the requirements associated with traditional “stage‐gate” NPD processes used for physical product development. Managers in DSC settings face a tension inherent to distributed work: keeping internal and external development efforts separate to exploit the design capabilities within a network of software suppliers, while ensuring effective delivery of a stream of bundled products. Many managers face this coordination tension with little, if any, prior knowledge of how to create a streamlined and effective DSC. Our research indicates that these managers need to make a series of interrelated decisions: the number of suppliers to qualify and include in or exclude from the DSC; the basis for measuring and modifying the scope of the suppliers' work; the need to account for asymmetric cost structures and expertise across the DSC; the mechanisms for synchronizing development work across elements of the DSC; and the approaches for developing skills—both technical and administrative—that project managers need for utilizing in‐house competencies while acquiring and assimilating design know‐how from external development organizations. When managers take a flexible approach toward these decisions based on a modular set of software development projects, they can improve their NPD outcomes through technical and organizational experimentation and adjust their own resource deployment to best utilize the suppliers' capabilities within their DSC.     

Experimental Evidence on Product Adoption in the Presence of Network Externalities

The benefits accruing to a purchaser of a product due to the existing base of consumers of the same or compatible products are known as network externalities. This paper studies Katz and Shapiro's (1986) model of network externalities in an experimental setting. Two sellers choose prices for competing technologies sold to two groups of four buyers purchasing sequentially in two stages. The results are qualitatively consistent with Katz and Shapiro's equilibrium predictions. In certain sessions over three-quarters of first stage buyers purchase the more expensive technology anticipating that later arriving buyers will also buy this technology. In periods where a strong network has been established for a technology in the first stage, over 80 percent of second stage buyers buy that technology, even though in most cases it is priced higher. The data, however, differ from the point predictions of the model.     

The Estimation of a Cusp Model to Describe the Adoption of Word for Windows*

This article revisits earlier work in this journal by Paul Herbig (1991) that proposed a catastrophe model of industrial product adoption under certain conditions. Catastrophe models are useful for modeling situations where organizations can exhibit both smooth and abrupt adoption behavior. It extends Herbig's work by focusing on organizations' adoption of new products when network externalities are an important part of the decision process, and it presents an empirical estimation of the model. Network externalities occur when firms do not want to adopt a new innovation or product unless other firms do. The reason is that they do not want to end up with an innovation that ends up not being a standard of some sort. Mistakes of this nature can be costly as the firm must invest twice and loses time relative to competitors who have not made such a mistake. However, when such externalities exist, for example with regard to technological adoptions, then normal diffusion gives way to sudden discontinuous shifts as all firms seemingly act together an move to a new technology. Since, technology is an area where the authors expect network externalities to exist, that is the focus of this article. The specific application is developed from two sets of panel data on the organizational adoptions of Microsoft's (MS) Word for Windows software by organizations that previously were using either Word for DOS or Word for Macintosh (Mac). The theoretical framework for the analysis is based on work in the economics literature on network externalities. However, the organization and new product development catastrophe model comes primarily from Herbig (1991) . The article focuses on an area of organizational adoption where relatively little empirical research has been done, namely organizational adoption “for use.” Longitudinal data provided by Techtel Corporation is used to develop the estimations. Results of the empirical analysis are consistent with the theoretical framework suggested in Herbig's article and in those found in economics and catastrophe theory literatures. This lends clear support to the idea that organizations will adopt a bandwagon‐type behavior when network externalities are present. It further suggests that in such markets, the standard S‐shaped diffusion curve is not an appropriate model for examining organizational behavior. From a managerial perspective, it means that buyers and sellers may face nonstandard diffusion curves. Instead of S‐shaped curves, the actual curves have a break or rift where sales end, and there is a sudden shift to a new product that is relatively high very early on. Clearly, for new product development (NPD), it suggest that organizations' “for‐use” purchases may be similar to regular consumers and may change rapidly from one product to another almost instantly, as in the case of the switch from vinyl records to compact discs (CDs). From an old product seller's viewpoint, the market is here today and gone tomorrow, while for the new seller it is a sudden deluge of sales requests. To put it in more everyday terms, sudden changes in adoption behavior are a September 11‐type experience for the market. It is the day the world changes.     

Research Opportunities Related to Consumer Response to Product Design*

This essay identifies five research opportunities that concern consumer response to product design. The first opportunity involves the need for more research on the interaction between form and function in consumer product evaluations. To this end, more knowledge about how product appearance characteristics influence consumer evaluation of both product form and function, and how this differs between countries and in time, is needed. The second research opportunity concerns the influence of consumer input in the front end of new product development on product success. Although the positive effect of market information use on product success is known, more actionable insight into which consumer information or input is beneficial in which circumstances is largely missing. The third opportunity for research concerns how to include subjective product attributes in concept testing. Getting valid feedback from consumers, which includes functional as well as emotional and experiential aspects, can improve proficiency in the early stages of product development. In this essay, several ways of approaching this research endeavor are highlighted. Next to enhancing market receipt and the assessment of product design, two topics that concern consumer response to product design from a more managerial viewpoint are identified. The first of these is strategic management of product styling. The importance and opportunities of visual design for brand management has gained more attention in the literature; different strategies and the cases in which they are beneficial are issues for further research. And finally, the design of product service systems (PSSs) provides opportunities for future research. Here, engendering perceptual unity between products and services and an explicit managing of meanings and feelings that PSSs should communicate are issues at play.     

合理用纸与工艺技术相匹配能提高产品质量

自从印刷术发明以来,纸张就一直作为大部分印刷品的承印物.所以纸张的好坏对印刷品的品质有直接的作用。本文作者从另一个角度讲述了纸张对印刷品的影响,他以其多年来在印刷工艺上的研究经验,详实地为我们阐述了制版、晒版等工艺过程对纸张适性的要求     

Approaches to Accelerating Product and Process Development

How can organizations shorten the length of the new products development process? This is undoubtedly one of the key questions facing managers today. One important goal is early market entry, maximizing competitive advantage in the process. Bela Gold draws on his experience with product and process development in a wide array of industries to identify eight approaches to accelerating development. Drawing on his field research, he briefly appraises the potentials, limitations, and risks of each and then discusses implications for a more promising strategy.