How manufacturers value purchase offerings: An exploratory study

The notion of value and the principles and methods that buyers use to discover which supplier offering has more value needs to drive all business marketing activity. However, the concept of value and how to measure it is somewhat vague. The authors present a simple way to think about value. The research reports an exploratory empirical study of how the valuation model fits the views of purchasing managers and how purchasing agents view value and use it to make decisions. In general, the model posited appears to fit the view of purchasing agents, however, there is some digression and further research is needed.     

Forecasting derived product demand in commercial construction

This article presents a practical scheme for forecasting derived demand for an industrial product used in the nonresidential construction industry. The method proposed includes a basic product requirement model to be used in conjunction with lagged construction award data. Twelve-month moving averages are used to smooth the basic construction contract award data which is analyzed by construction type and by geographic region.The methodology described enables accurate product sales potential estimation, and when compared with smoothed historical sales data, provides a means of evaluating market penetration. Although the method presented is concerned primarily with forecasting in the relatively short term, the scheme may be extended to a medium term corresponding roughly to the construction cycle. The article deals with application to a specific industry segment. However, the forecasting and evaluation procedure is adaptable to other industrial products.     

Online R&D management: the way forward

The development of an intranet system in BT delivered far greater savings in 1996 than was originally estimated. BT decided to look at the advantages of online R&D management processes. Various features of the evolving system are described, including the proposal submission system or project requirements document, and tools and techniques to manage a global virtual laboratory.     

Emergence of entrepreneurs following exogenous technological change

This paper explains how, after an exogenous technological change occurs, entrepreneurs displace incumbents who were ex ante capable of exploiting any innovations that resulted from the change. The model initially considers classical economic assumptions in the context of process innovations, and then its robustness to uncertainty, bounded rationality, firm asymmetry, and product innovations are discussed. The model is preliminarily tested against industry trends, using both results from an analysis of the information technology sector and from the literature. The paper does not suffer from the inconsistency of explaining how capable incumbents are displaced by resorting to characterizations of incumbents as incapable due to some inefficiency; the paper models incumbents as efficient yet rationally choosing, in some instances, to be displaced. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring new product success: an empirical investigation of Australian SMEs

New product development (NPD) has long been recognised as one of the corporate core functions. However, measuring new product success has remained elusive. This paper attempts to examine several conceptual issues underlining the measurement of new product success and the measurement practice adopted in Australian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The sample included 276 SMEs from two most innovative industries: chemical and machinery industries. Results have indicated that four factors underline the commonly used success measurement: financial performance, objective market acceptance, subjective market acceptance, and product-level measures. These four factors are related to each other and can be used to well predict the overall measurement. The most frequently used specific measures in Australian SMEs are customer acceptance, customer satisfaction, product performance, and quality.