ALBERT

Beschreibung: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Beschreibung: Presents information on forthcoming Engineering Management society conferences.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of the editors, board members, and current staff for this issue of the publication.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of board members, committee members, editors, and society officers.

Beschreibung: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Beschreibung: Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

Beschreibung: Spare parts support services have received increasing management attention due to the growing number of critical systems in many business sectors. In this paper, we examine an integrated system design approach to customize spare parts support services based on response time with inventory pooling strategies. To provide customized services that meet user requirements for spare part response time, we depart from the traditional spare parts management and develop a systematic approach to design service parts support services based on axiomatic design theory. In particular, we focus on pricing discrimination decisions in service parts contracts for two-tier users under a mechanism design framework. Distinguishing between users of next-day and same-day contracts for service parts operations, we further evaluate the effect of various inventory pool structures with reserve strategies through a simulation model for the objective of cost minimization. These analytical results of this new approach provide guidance for managers in customizing spare parts support services with the holistic consideration of pricing scheme, response time, and inventory policy.

Beschreibung: This paper considers an auto parts supplier who receives order release updates from its customers and revises its production plan for future periods on a weekly basis. The inaccuracy of the order releases causes significant costs in the form of premium expedited transportation, production overtime, and excess inventory. This setting provides a rich context for studying order release variance, because the supply chain has adopted a just-in-time (JIT) approach where ideal inventory levels are kept at zero. This leads to a high reliance on order release accuracy in order to manage production quantities. This paper presents an optimization model that extends previous approaches focused on optimizing production plans to the JIT setting. Furthermore, based on real order release information provided to the supplier, two simple adjustment heuristic methods are developed. The performances of these approaches are compared with relying solely on order releases received from the customers. The simple median-based adjustment heuristic performs the best of all the approaches. Implications of the analysis are also discussed.

Beschreibung: This paper considers a manufacturer who outsources the production of a product to multiple competing suppliers, who differ in their cost structures and in their capabilities for producing high-quality products. The manufacturer must design the sourcing process to ensure that the selected supplier has sufficient quality capability, while encouraging competition among the suppliers. We develop and analyze a mathematical model of performance-based contracting, a sourcing method that is appropriate when the manufacturer has imperfect information regarding the suppliers’ costs and capabilities. We compare the performance of performance-based contracting with that of a two-stage sourcing process, an alternative sourcing method that is more commonly used in practice. The theoretical results and managerial insights derived from this research can enable manufacturing firms to improve the management of their sourcing processes. In particular, we demonstrate that performance-based contracting with a symmetric linear penalty/reward function will always outperform the two-stage sourcing process from the perspective of the buyer and that the optimal penalty/reward rate is less than or equal to the unit warranty cost. In addition, performance-based contracting generally leads to a higher quality level provided by the winning supplier. However, the winning supplier is generally better off under the two-stage sourcing process.

Beschreibung: We investigate when and how an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) should offer a trade-in rebate to recover used products in order to achieve better price discrimination and weaken competition from third-party remanufacturers (3PRs). This paper is motivated by a major IT equipment OEM, which negotiates with customers to offer them personalized trade-in rebates to induce them to return their old products and purchase new units. The company also faces increasing competition from 3PRs. We model such a trade-in program with negotiated rebates through a generalized Nash bargaining framework. Our main research question is whether the OEM should compete with a 3PR using only a trade-in program or by offering remanufactured products, or through both options. In the absence of 3PRs, the OEM always prefers to offer the trade-in program compared with not offering a trade-in program. As a trade-in program also helps to restrict the supply of used products to 3PRs, one would expect that offering a trade-in program would be more attractive in the presence of a 3PR. We show, however, that the OEM may find it detrimental to offer a trade-in program when faced with competition from a 3PR. We also show that despite the fact that cores are readily available via the trade-ins, the trade-in program makes it less attractive for the OEM to remanufacture. Finally, we show that offering a trade-in program may also lead to lower total environmental impact, but only in the presence of remanufactured products.

Beschreibung: Decision support systems (DSSs) for supply chain risk management benefit from a holistic approach for mitigating risks, which include identification and assessment of risks and evaluation and selection of measures to appease risks. However, previous studies in this area overlooked probability estimation, measure selection, and assessment of interdependence of risks and measures. We aim to fill these gaps in the literature by proposing a two-stage DSSs that will assist managers in not only select mitigation strategies for supply chain risks, but also mitigation tactics when risks occur. Our DSS employs a novel matrix formulation for decision-tree analysis, which integrates expert judgments. We applied our models to the supply chain of a fast-expanding offshore-wind industry, which faces high levels of exposure to risks because of the associated complexities in this domain. The results demonstrate how to select mitigation strategies and mitigation tactics for managing supply chain risks within the offshore-wind industry.

Beschreibung: These instructions give guidelines for preparing papers for this publication. Presents information for authors publishing in this journal.

Beschreibung: This paper investigates a vertically differentiated product (VDP) line design problem in both a centralized and decentralized supply chain setting with one manufacturer and one retailer. We study how the product variety decision making in the decentralized setting affects the number of VDPs developed and produced by the manufacturer, as well as the number of products that the retailer will accept from the manufacturer. We show the value of flexibility, timeliness of information, and product development lead time reduction in three market scenarios where the retailer will elect to carry a product only if the product meets a specified target profit. Our results reveal that if the manufacturer faces a long design lead time and designs only one product line, he may be better off not lowering wholesale prices to accommodate the retailer's profit restriction. If design lead time is short, negotiation between manufacturer and retailer along with a side payment could possibly lead to a profit improving solution for both parties. Optimization models and computational results are presented.

Beschreibung: This study empirically investigates the merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies of focal firms by considering their market and technology position at the industry level. The results obtained using patents, firm M&A agreements, and the financial data of U.S. technology firms from 1997 through 2008 demonstrate how industry leaders, challengers, and niche players differ in their M&A strategic logic. Three industry environmental factors and two technology positioning factors exhibit different effects on firms’ M&A strategies for varied market positions. The overall patterns reveal that niche players are more aggressive in leveraging their technology positions to adopt M&As for the purpose of acquiring access to external knowledge resources, while leaders tend to leverage their market positions and use M&As to further strengthen their market power. Challengers are more likely to engage in M&As when locating in unfavorable environmental markets, but they are less likely to engage in M&As when locating in technologically crowded areas.

Beschreibung: Due to the characteristics of cross-functional teams, trust is crucial for cross-functional teams to enhance performance. However, as a significant factor, trust had been neglected in previous team performance models. In this paper, we investigate whether trust can be used as a predictor of cross-functional team performance by proposing a prediction model. The inputs of the model are both team structural and contextual (SC) factors, and project process (PP) factors, which are two major sources that form team trust. The output of the model is different levels of team performance, which consists of internal performance and external performance. The support vector machine techniques are used to establish the model. Results show that prediction accuracy is high (84.95%) when using both SC and PP factors as inputs, while PP factors have better prediction accuracy than SC factors on team performance and internal performance. It is suggested that team trust can be used as a good predictor of cross-functional team performance. In practice, this paper presents a better understanding of the relationship between trust and performance in cross-functional teams, and thus, enhances practitioners’ managerial skills. It also gives reference for managers to dynamically control and predict team performance during project period.

Beschreibung: Virtual communities have become ubiquitous and vital in nearly all professions. These communities typically involve voluntary participation, and given that these communities are not organization specific, community members’ motivations for participation vary. In this study, we investigate the motivations of the members of a professional virtual community to engage in knowledge exchange. We synthesize social exchange theory and the theory of reasoned action to identify critical determinants of attitudes toward knowledge exchange in virtual communities, namely, trust among participants, anticipated reciprocal relationships, and the relevance of the community to participants’ jobs. Additionally, we posit that attitudes will influence the intention to use the virtual community and that this relationship will be moderated by the perceived quality of the information exchanged within the community. We test our research model using data compiled from a community of research scientists in South Korea. Our findings indicate that trust among participants has a positive influence on attitudes toward both sharing and acquiring knowledge. The anticipation of a reciprocal relationship has a positive effect on attitudes toward knowledge acquisition, and job relevance has a positive effect on attitudes toward knowledge sharing. Furthermore, attitudes toward knowledge acquisition affect attitudes toward knowledge sharing, and attitudes toward knowledge sharing positively influence intentions to use a virtual community. We also find that perceived information quality negatively moderates the relationship between attitudes toward knowledge sharing and user intentions to use a virtual community. We interpret and discuss these findings, and their implications for research and practice.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of the editors, board members, and current staff for this issue of the publication.

Beschreibung: This issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT includes 11 research articles. The relevance and usefulness of the articles are summarized. In addition, it is noted that the publication is changing the name of one of the journal's departments from "Technology and Innovation Management" to "Technology, InnovationManagement and Entrepreneurship" to reflect the increasing significance entrepreneurship is gaining in practice and academia related to engineering and business around the world. Other related publication issues are also mentioned.

Beschreibung: There have been numerous studies examining the effects of social role theory on negative stereotyping of female managers, including low perceived likeability and unwillingness by subordinates to trust them. These attributions are particularly relevant in the context of “male-dominated” jobs, such as technical disciplines like engineering and project management. We investigated the specific setting of project manager job candidate selection, a professional discipline that has historically been male-dominated, but one that has seen a large rise in female project managers over the past decade. We examined the perceptions of respondents to differences in male and female job candidates based on the critical personal/managerial characteristics of trust and likeability. Using a scenario-based survey questionnaire, we sampled 312 project management personnel and tested subjects’ reactions to two candidates for a project management position, employing identical descriptions and language while only changing the candidate's name: Susan or Stan. Our results suggested that, contrary to expectations, respondents’ perceptions of the female candidate, Susan, were significantly higher across both managerial dimensions of likeability and trust. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Beschreibung: A number of environmental forces such as increasing value chain network complexity, decreasing product life-cycle cost, and time-to-market requirements or increasing product complexity act upon manufacturing organizations, enhancing the acute need for organizational routines that foster efficient and effective communication between processes. Such organizational routines erode quickly in the absence of common standards for knowledge sharing, that is why successful manufacturing systems benefit from interprocess standardization. The purpose of this paper is to offer a standardization model of interprocess communication that increases manufacturing operational performance (MOP). First, we propose a novel holistic model that makes standardized interprocess communication possible in manufacturing organizations. Second, we propose a model for quantifying the implications of standardizing interprocess communication upon MOP. Finally, as a matter of application, we show the results of its successful implementation in one Japanese manufacturing organization.

Beschreibung: The loss of critical human skills that are either nonreplenishable or take very long periods of time to reconstitute impacts the support of legacy systems ranging from infrastructure, military, and aerospace to information technology. Many legacy systems must be supported for long periods of time because they are prohibitively expensive to replace. Loss of critical human skills is a problem for legacy system support organizations as they try to understand and mitigate the effects of an aging workforce with highly specialized low-demand skill sets. Existing literature focuses on workers that have skills that are obsolete and therefore need to be retrained to remain employable; alternatively, this paper addresses the system support impacts due to the lack of workers with the required skill set. This paper develops a model for forecasting the loss of critical human skills and the impact of that loss on the future cost of system support. The model can be used to support business cases for system replacement. A detailed case study of a legacy control system from the chemical manufacturing industry is provided and managerial insights associated with the support of the system drawn.

Beschreibung: A product platform is a set of subsystems and interfaces that are commonly shared by a variety of products. Although platform sharing is considered an effective means of cost saving, it also runs the risk of propagating a particular failure across multiple products when the platform is defectively designed. Thus, sharing a common platform effectively can amplify the risk of incurring a large number of failures. In this paper, we formulate a quantitative model for assessing amplified failure risk. Our analysis shows an unexpected result that the platform risk increases as we become more assured of our design capability; i.e., when a defective design rarely happens, the magnitude of risk amplification becomes much larger. The numerical investigation of a platform planning case sheds light on the importance of risk assessment in determining the level of commonality in designing a platform.

Beschreibung: The dynamic facility layout problem considers flow over multiple time periods in an environment where the material flow between departments changes over time. If this complex problem is combined with the other system problems, such as material handling system designing, this results in a more complicated problem. In most recently proposed approaches for these two synchronized problems, the integrated formulations have been used where the objective function is a weighted sum of some conflicting objectives that may belong to either one or different decision makers. In the former case, the poor practicability of such an approach is due to the difficulty of normalizing these functions and of quantifying the weights. In addition to these problems, in multiagent systems with a strong cooperation, there is another important problem in incorporating the conflicting objectives of conflicting decision makers that is not considered in the existing researches. By these descriptions, developing some other solution strategies, such as iterative or hierarchical methods, are necessary for these cases. In this paper, a bilevel model is developed. The experimental results reveal significant enhancements with respect to more classical approaches (i.e., integrated formulation and Pareto optimal solutions) based on the proposed bilevel model and algorithms.

Beschreibung: Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

Beschreibung: In online social networks, because one's private information can be co-owned and disclosed by peers, a new type of privacy concern, i.e., information privacy concern about peer disclosure (IPCPD), looms large. Should a member of an online social network be offered decision control to veto ex-ante the disclosure of his/her information by peers? There has been no theoretical research on the effectiveness of decisional control to alleviate such a privacy concern. Drawing on the communication privacy management perspective and the impression management theory, this study proposes a three-way interaction effect among three important antecedents of IPCPD: 1) decisional control; 2) image discrepancy (i.e., the degree to which the disclosed information portrays an unfavorable image of the disclosed person); and 3) social network overlap between the disclosed person and the discloser. Our experimental study reveals significant findings. When image discrepancy is low, decisional control is helpful only when the social network overlap between the disclosed one and the discloser is low. When image discrepancy is high, decisional control is helpful only when the social network overlap between the disclosed one and the discloser is high. This study contributes to a theory of privacy concern about peer disclosure in the context of online social networks.

Beschreibung: To increase their likelihoods of product-market success, innovating firms use strategic signals to communicate with market participants in order to reduce participants’ perceived uncertainties associated with their innovative products. We examine, during a standards war involving a technology-based product, the influence of technology-, market-, and standards-related strategic signals on the stock price of one of the product-market's technology leaders. A technology leader is defined as a firm that develops and promotes its proprietary product design to become industry standard. Using event study methodology, we find that a technology leader's market- and standards-related signals have significant positive influences on this leader's stock price; competitor technology leaders ’ technology-related and standards-related signals have significant negative influences, while these competitor leaders’ market-related signals have a significant positive influence; and c ompetitor technology followers ’ market- and standards-related signals lacked significant influences, while these followers’ technology-related signals possessed a weak negative influence.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of board members, committee members and society officers.

Beschreibung: These instructions give guidelines for preparing papers for this publication. Presents information for authors publishing in this journal.

Beschreibung: This paper aims at investigating the relationships between the adoption of open innovation by companies and their context features, internal R&D, and financial performances. Two proxies for openness—variety and intensity—are defined, and six hypotheses are formulated and tested on a sample of 68 worldwide top R&D spending pharmaceutical companies. The period of 2008–2012 was analyzed for a total of 340 statistical units. Our results suggest that open innovation is a very pervasive behavior among smaller and younger companies, for which internal R&D is complementary to openness; still being in the development phase, they derive most of their revenues from open innovation itself and show negative financial performances. Yet, a wider range of open transactions are performed by larger and longer established firms, exhibiting good financial performances and adopting open innovation as a substitution to internal R&D efforts. Through an in-depth review of the literature, this paper contributes to the research on open innovation by providing an accounting measurement system, testing six hypotheses among open innovation and some firm-level variables, and positioning the obtained results within the current debate.

Beschreibung: Motivated by observations that consumers demand product variety and scope economies or diseconomies for multiple products are prevalent, we develop two supply chain models under different channel leaderships, namely the retailer(-led) Stackelberg (RS) model and manufacturer(-led) Stackelberg (MS) model, to address the issues on product variety and pricing. In the RS case, we find that if it is not too costly to increase variety, the manufacturer's profit increases with diseconomies of scope, and it is optimal to provide a greater variety than the variety just covering the market under the centralized supply chain, while the decentralized supply chain provides a variety level just covering the market; however, the variety under the decentralized supply chain is greater than that under the centralized system. In addition, a higher shelf cost for the retailer strengthens the double marginalization effect. For the MS model, when we compare it with the RS model, we find that the retail price under the MS model is higher than that under the RS model, while the variety level under the MS model is higher when scope economies exist and whether variety and channel profit under the MS model are higher highly depends on shelf cost and marginal variety cost.

Beschreibung: While business analytics is being increasingly used to gain data-driven insights to support decision making, little research exists regarding the mechanism through which business analytics can be used to improve decision-making effectiveness (DME) at the organizational level. Drawing on the information processing view and contingency theory, this paper develops a research model linking business analytics to organizational DME. The research model is tested using structural equation modeling based on 740 responses collected from U.K. businesses. The key findings demonstrate that business analytics, through the mediation of a data-driven environment, positively influences information processing capability, which in turn has a positive effect on DME. The findings also demonstrate that the paths from business analytics to DME have no statistical differences between large and medium companies, but some differences between manufacturing and professional service industries. Our findings contribute to the business analytics literature by providing useful insights into business analytics applications and the facilitation of data-driven decision making. They also contribute to managers’ knowledge and understanding by demonstrating how business analytics should be implemented to improve DME.

Beschreibung: This mixed-methods study investigates a dilemma that interorganizational groups formed to develop long-lived capital assets invariably face at the project front end: either invest in flexible design structures that cope economically with change in requirements, this is design to evolve—at risk of the extra costs not paying off if the uncertainties fail to resolve favorably later on, or endorse cheaper but more rigid designs—at risk of higher adaptation costs if the uncertainties materialize in the future. Through an empirical study grounded in the British railway sector, we reveal that groups regularly engage in informal future-proofing discussions to address this dilemma. But faced with tight budgets and timescales as well as differing interests, the groups struggle to achieve consensus over the need for flexible designs. Through lab experiments and taking a flat governance structure as given, we unexpectedly find that an administrative device to facilitate multiparty future-proofing talks has limited impact on the outcomes. Hence, we argue that a collective action problem is central to interorganizational development of flexible capital designs. We conclude by discussing alternative structures to govern the project front end, and how to better exploit the value of flexible designs.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of the editors, board members, and current staff for this issue of the publication.

Beschreibung: There is an extensive literature on the success/failure of firm-funded R&D projects, but growing policy interest focuses on publicly funded R&D projects. We discuss this literature, which builds on a long stream of research of which Albert Rubenstein was a prime investigator, and use the literature to motivate the theoretical and empirical parts of the paper. Using data from 1878 Phase II R&D projects funded through the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, of which 624 had been discontinued prior to technical completion, we provide for the first time quantitative findings on the success/failure of publicly funded firm-performed R&D projects. Using a single-equation qualitative choice model, we find that prior R&D experience with the technology funded by SBIR projects, the amount of the SBIR award, and having a female as a principle investigator, other factors held constant, are all negatively related to the probability of project failure. In contrast, firm size is positively associated with project failure. We did not find evidence that human capital, experiential knowledge embodied in the firm conducting the R&D, or university involvement in the R&D project affected the probability of project failure. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice, policy, and further research.

Beschreibung: Members in a vendor managed inventory (VMI) supply chain make joint decisions on inventory policy and cooperative advertizing by capitalizing on their interactions. However, very few investigations have been reported to develop methods to facilitate such joint decision making due to the modeling difficulty and computation complexity. This study is, thus, to address the joint VMI, cooperative advertizing, and profit-sharing decision making in a coordinative way. It considers a two-level VMI supply chain including a manufacturer and m retailers, and deals with many decisions, e.g., chain members’ advertizing investments profit sharing. A nonlinear mixed integer Nash bargaining model is developed to model the complex joint decision making of ( m +1) players. In view of the difficulties in model solving, this study further develops a solution methodology, including an integrated model and hybrid algorithm for obtaining optimal solutions. Thanks to the integrated model, the hybrid algorithm, which is developed based on analytical methods, a genetic algorithm, and a Lagrange multiplier method, obtains optimal solutions to the Nash bargaining model while greatly reducing computation complexity. Numerical examples demonstrate the validity of the Nash bargaining model and the effectiveness of the solution methodology. Finally, a number of managerial implications are drawn based on sensitivity analysis.

Beschreibung: Numerous decisions have to be made in early design processes. Often times they involve many actors, with the difficulty that they are shared across numerous parallel collaborative groups, for coordination and meeting scheduling reasons. This paper aims at facilitating collaborative decision-making process by grouping actors according to the relationships they have due to their assignment to decisions. Clusters of actors are proposed in order to provide decision makers with a temporary and complementary organization designed for making efficiently simultaneous collaborative decisions. This approach has been illustrated through actual data in a new product development project in the automotive industry.

Beschreibung: Firms need to invest their scarce resources into the most promising new business opportunities (e.g., new engineering technologies). Yet, the literature on strategic entrepreneurship pays little attention to how, and how thoroughly, firms appraise potential opportunities based on technical as well as managerial criteria. Given that such evaluation takes considerable time, energy, attention, and skill on the part of employees, we propose that firms need to establish a fit between the thoroughness of opportunity appraisal and their reward as well as performance evaluation practices. Evidence from a double-respondent sample of 565 Danish firms supports our theoretical expectations.

Beschreibung: Project planning is widely thought to be an important contributor to project success. However, there is a little research to affirm its impact and give guidance as to how much effort should be spent on planning to achieve best results. We aim to rectify this omission. Data was collected on 1386 projects from 859 respondents via a global survey. A significant relationship was found between the quality of the planning deliverables and success. Detailed analysis of the data collected revealed an inverted-U relationship between the percentage of effort spent on planning and project success. After correcting for key moderator effects, a significant relationship with an R 2 of 0.15 was revealed. Further analysis showed that the fraction of planning effort that maximized the project success was 25% of project effort. This was substantially more than the 15% mean value reported by respondents. The greatest impact was found to be on the broad success measures with a lesser effect on project efficiency: time; budget; and scope. The inverted-U relationship between effort spent on planning and project success indicates that projects can spend too much time in planning, as well as too little. But we found that projects are spending less time in planning than the optimum to achieve best results.

Beschreibung: Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.

Beschreibung: When faced with a complex design problem, a design team may separate it into subproblems. We would like to know when this approach is superior and how subproblems should be assigned to team members. We created mathematical models of searches that represent bounded rational decision-makers (“agents”) solving a design problem. These discrete-time Markov chains were used to calculate the probability distribution of the value of the solution found and the expected number of steps required. We evaluated the performance of two- and three-agent teams who used two approaches to solve design problems. In the “all-at-once” approach, they search the entire set of solutions. In the “separation” approach, they separate the problem into two subproblems. Three stopping rules and two different types of collaboration were modeled. Using a separation increases the likelihood of finding a high-value solution when high-value solutions are less likely. The optimal assignment of team members to subproblems depended upon the distribution of values in the solution space. These results suggest that more effort should be spent developing better concepts when high-quality concepts are rare. When concepts have similar performance, more effort should be spent searching for better designs that implement the selected concept.

Beschreibung: This paper focuses on the multiobjective solutions of the flow shop scheduling problem with and without sequence dependent setup times. In our case, the two objectives are the minimization of makespan and total flowtime. These problems are solved with a novel multiobjective local search framework-based decomposition, called multiobjective local search based decomposition (MOLSD), which decomposes a multiobjective problem into a number of single objective optimization subproblems using aggregation method and optimizes them simultaneously. First, a problem-specific Nawaz–Enscore–Hoam heuristic is used to initialize the population to enhance the quality of the initial solution. Second, a Pareto local search embedded with a heavy perturbation operator is applied to search the promising neighbors of each nondominated solution found so far. Then, when solving each subproblem, a single insert-based local search, a multiple local search strategy, and a doubling perturbation mechanism are designed to exploit the new individual. Finally, a restarted method is used to avoid the algorithm trapping into the local optima, which has a significant effect on the performance of the MOLSD. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted by two standard multiobjective metrics: 1) hyper-volume indicator; and 2) set coverage. The experimental results show that the proposed MOLSD provides better solutions that several state of the art algorithms.

Beschreibung: Using a multilevel approach, we explore the entrepreneur gender–innovation relationship in new ventures. We investigate individual education, interfirm network ties, and firm regional location using a sample of 4265 new Korean firms. Results show that male entrepreneurs, compared with female, are more likely to complete engineering or natural science degrees, maintain heterogeneous interfirm network ties, and locate firms in clustered regions. Further, engineering or natural science degrees, heterogeneous interfirm network ties, and locating in clustered regions are positively associated with firm innovation. We find that individual education, interfirm network ties, and firm regional location mediate the entrepreneur gender–firm innovation relationship.

Beschreibung: The relationship between team diversity and new product performance is often assumed to be linear. This assumption has been challenged conceptually and empirically, but results to date have been inconsistent. This study examines this issue based on behavioral theory and social identity theory. The empirical results generally supported our expectations of the inverse U-shaped relationship between team diversity and new product performance. We also hypothesized and found that organizational slack moderated the curvilinear relationship between team diversity and new product performance. A questionnaire survey on 118 new product development projects in Taiwanese firms is collected to test the hypotheses. We conclude by discussing the managerial implications of these findings for the use of team composition to the new product projects in personnel selection.

Beschreibung: Function point analysis (FPA) is a standardized method to systematically measure the functional size of software. This method is proposed by an international organization and it is currently recommended by governments and organizations as a standard method to be adopted for this type of measurement. This paper presents a compilation of improvements, focused on increasing the accuracy of the FPA method, which have been proposed over the past 13 years. The methodology used was a systematic literature review (SLR), which was conducted with four research questions aligned with the objectives of this study. As a result of the SLR, of the 1600 results returned by the search engines, 454 primary studies were preselected according to the criteria established for the SLR. Among these studies, only 18 specifically referred to accuracy improvements for FPA, which was the goal of this study. The low number of studies that propose FPA improvements might demonstrate the maturity of the method in the current scenario of software metrics. Specifically in terms of found issues, it was found that the step for calculating the functional size exhibited the highest number of problems, indicating the need to revise FPA in order to encompass the possible improvements suggested by the researchers.

Beschreibung: Scheduling in the mass customization (MC) of global producer services is a typical multiobjective dynamic optimization issue, which is constrained by stochastic demand and resources. Such scheduling frequently challenges the cross-border decision-making processes of multinational enterprises (MNEs). The academic literature has yet to examine this optimization, although studies on the MC of tangible product provision are numerous. To address this challenge effectively, we construct a novel stochastic multiobjective dynamic scheduling model by considering the key features of the MC of global producer services, namely, stochastic demand, distinctive characteristics of customization orders, special stage classification, economies of scale, stochastic service capabilities, and pressures for global integration versus local responsiveness. We improve the ant algorithm to solve the scheduling problem and illustrate the feasibility, validity, and applicability of the new model and algorithm using the case of an MNE that provides seismic acquisition services for oil companies. The results suggest that the proposed algorithm can achieve the flexibility and balance of multiobjective optimization. The major optimization indicators suggest that the scheduling improved the overall economies of scale on the supply chain, which is a key factor in ensuring the success of the MC of global producer services. By incorporating the methodology of operational research and the perspective of international business, this study contributes to the literature of operational research by developing a novel scheduling model for the MC of global producer services.

Beschreibung: We develop a model to enable engineering professional services firms to improve the management of their competitive resources, i.e., skilled engineers, to be better able to respond to customer demand. The model was informed by semistructured interviews with senior executives from engineering, information technology (IT) services and technical consulting firms. As a result, we capture many of the complexities associated with the resource planning process in the professional engineering services sector. In the resulting model, the key attributes of supply, demand, and operations constraints are identified. Based on information obtained from the interviews, a number of test firms are created. We then use these test firms to study the impact of various resource planning policies on firm performance. These policies include the skill mix and profile of skilled employees, limits on the number of concurrent projects to which an employee can be assigned, and policies governing employee cross-training and hiring. The impact of these policies is evaluated in terms of business metrics, such as the project completion rate and net revenue. Finally, our model is extended to capture a multiphase rolling planning horizon, where projects may span multiple phases with the goal of ensuring consistency in employee assignment to projects.

Beschreibung: Research suggests that flexible manufacturing resources, customer involvement, and product management tools contribute to a high level of mass customization capability. Conceptualizing these antecedents as resource types, we examine hypotheses about their direct and complementary effects on mass customization capability. Analyzing secondary survey data from 238 plants in eight countries and three industries via hierarchical linear regression, we find that each individual resource type has a positive direct effect on mass customization capability, as long as the levels of the other two resources are at their sample mean value. Probing these results via conditional effects and marginal effects plots provides partial support for the complementarity argument, and unveil complex nonlinear interactions among the three resource types. When the level of one resource type is low, the two remaining resource types exhibit a strong bivariate complementary effect on mass customization capability. Conversely, when one resource type is at a high level, the complementary effect on mass customization capability of the two remaining resource types disappears and is replaced by a cancellation effect. The detection of complementary effects and of cancellation effects are two specific theoretical contributions to the literature on how manufacturers can enhance their capability to mass customize.

Beschreibung: This paper presents a complex telecom investment problem analysis using system of systems concepts. This is necessary due to problem's multidimensional nature with several interdependences, and the presence of uncertainty and competition. A genetic algorithm is implemented in MATLAB in order to optimize the objective function (operator's profitability) of the formulated nonlinear programming problem. This approach is capable of providing optimal policies (regarding, e.g., services pricing, inception of investment, or revenues reinvestment) in a competitive market helping future investors in decision making by using various emulated strategic plans as reference.

Beschreibung: Presents the author's memories of Professor Al Rubenstein.

Beschreibung: Presents the author's memories of Professor Al Rubenstein.

Beschreibung: The pattern of information flow through the network of interdependent design activities is thought to be an important determinant of engineering design process results. A previously unexplored aspect of such patterns relates to the temporal dynamics of information transfer between activities as those activities are implemented through the network of people executing the project. To address this gap, we develop a dynamic modeling method that integrates both the network of people and the network of activities in the project. We then employ a large dataset collected from an industrial setting, consisting of project-related e-mails and activity records from the design and development of a renewable energy plant over the course of more than three years. Using network metrics for centrality and clustering, we make three important contributions: 1) We demonstrate a novel method for analyzing information flows between activities in complex engineering design projects; 2) we show how the network of information flows in a large-scale engineering project evolved over time and how network analysis yields several managerial insights; and 3) we provide a useful new representation of the engineering design process and thus support theory-building toward the evolution of information flows through systems engineering stages. Implications include guidance on how to analyze and predict information flows as well as better planning of information flows in engineering design projects according to their individual stage and activity characteristics.

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Beschreibung: Scientists and engineers are essential to Research and Development (R&D) organizations. Although the literature on technical professionals tends to characterize them in terms of dichotomies or even make no distinctions at all, it is known that human capital is more heterogeneous and nuanced. There is a need to revisit the underlying assumptions about technical professionals through deep empirical work to keep management connected to the reality of today's workforce. In this research, we explore different types of professional identities by examining the work motives and behavior of a group of employees in a scientific R&D organization. Using in-depth interviews with 25 scientists and engineers at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) center, we develop a motive-based model of technical professionals’ work identities. We found an overlapping spectrum of relevant work identities that go beyond the scientist versus engineer dichotomy. Our model suggests three dimensions of motivation (social orientation, temporality of reward, and involvement with technology) that define different technical professional's identity types-–among them, enablers, bridgers, researchers, and intrapreneurs. Depending on their dominant motivations and behaviors, these identities react differently to incentives. This research offers a more current and grounded classification of technical professionals, which has implications for both scholars studying intellectual human capital and managers leading organizations.

Beschreibung: Practitioners place strong emphasis on business cases with the expectation that using business cases to inform and drive investment decisions will assist in creating value from those investments. Maximizing the value generated by project investments is a central aim of the project portfolio management, and the business case provides the underlying rationale for the evaluation of the value created in each project. However, research regarding the use of business cases at a project portfolio level is scarce, and there is a little guidance for portfolio managers on when and how to control the business cases. We identify three elements of a business case control at the portfolio level—the initial review, the ongoing monitoring during the project execution, and the postproject tracking until the business case is realized—and investigate the relationship between business case control and project portfolio success. Furthermore, we analyze enablers and contingencies for the application of the business case control. Based on a cross-industry sample of 183 firms, we find that the business case control is positively related to the project portfolio success. Accountability for business case realization and corresponding incentive systems increase this positive effect. Finally, we show that the portfolio complexity also positively moderates the relationship.

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Beschreibung: Many manufacturers engaging in direct sales online face channel competition and conflict with traditional retailers. This paper studies a two-staged supply chain composed of a manufacturer, a retailer, and consumers with different aesthetic preferences. The manufacturer distributes a standard product via the conventional retailer. In addition, it offers a spectrum of customized products directly online. Modeling the firms’ decisions on offering customization, we study their dependence on consumers’ acceptance level of the online channel and consumers’ fix cost. We obtain the following key findings. First, with the manufacturer offering customized products online, the Pareto improvement zone, in which both the manufacturer's and retailer's profits are improved because of alleviated vertical competition and an enlarged market, exists only under certain circumstances, and it depends on consumers’ acceptance level of the online channel and their fit cost. Second, the manufacturer's offering customized products online does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the retail price. Third, the manufacturer is more aggressive in engaging in direct sales in a decentralized supply chain than in an integrated one, because it is less interested in alleviating horizontal competition (i.e., the competition between the standard and the customized products) in the decentralized setting.

Beschreibung: Forecasting the actual cost to complete a project is a critical challenge of project management, particularly for data-driven decision making in contingency control, cash flow analysis, and timely project financing. This paper presents a Bayesian project cost forecasting model that adaptively integrates preproject cost risk assessment and actual performance data into a range of possible project costs at a chosen confidence level. The second moment Bayesian (SMB) model brings more realism into project cost forecasting by explicitly accounting for inherent variability of cost performance, correlation between aggregated past and future performance, and the fraction of project completed at the time of forecasting. Functionally, the SMB model fully encompasses, as restrictive cases, two most commonly used index-based cost forecasting techniques in earned value management. The SMB model provides computationally efficient algebraic formulas to conduct robust probabilistic forecasting without additional burden of data collection or sophisticated statistical analysis. Numerical examples and simulation experiments are presented to demonstrate the predictive efficacy and practical applicability of the SMB in real project environments.

Beschreibung: Provides a listing of current staff, committee members and society officers.

Beschreibung: After various society and journal-based announcements the editor discusses the 13 research articles included in this issue. The relevance and usefulness of the articles is summarized.

Beschreibung: From 1992 until 1999, NASA adopted a Faster-Better-Cheaper (FBC) paradigm—i.e., smaller low-cost spacecraft—for its unmanned missions. When many early missions met their objectives at much lower cost than traditional flagship missions, the FBC approach seemed successful. However, after the failures of two Mars spacecraft in 1999, the FBC paradigm was viewed as a failed experiment. We reflect on the legacy of FBC. In particular, we focus on the organizational learning literature to explore whether FBC, a stretch goal, was a good step for NASA. Previous examinations of FBC have focused on failure rates rather than on cost effectiveness. We revisit the question of FBC by examining all unmanned NASA missions launched between 1974 and 2007. We find that FBC missions resulted in more scientific publications per dollar of mission cost than other types of missions. From our analysis, we perceive lasting benefits to current projects from the adoption of the stretch goals, and perceive that NASA suffers from a bias against learning from the FBC experiment because of the stigma of the high-profile failed projects. We conclude with the recommendation that NASA should challenge itself with stretch goals, but with science goals rather than human exploration goals.

Beschreibung: This paper seeks to explore the behavior and embodied energy involved in the decision-making of information technology/information systems (IT/IS) investments using a case within a small- to medium-sized manufacturing firm. By analyzing decision making within a given case context, this paper describes the nature of the investment through the lens of behavioral economics, causality, input–output (IO) equilibrium, and the general notion of depletion of executive energy function. To explore the interplay between these elements, the authors structure the case context via a morphological field in order to construct a fuzzy cognitive map of decision-making relationships relating to the multidimensional and nonquantifiable problems of IT/IS investment evaluation. Noting the significance of inputs and outputs relating to the investment decision within the case, the authors assess these cognitive interrelationships through the lens of the Leontief IO energy equilibrium model. Subsequently, the authors suggest, through an embodied energy audit, that all such management decisions are susceptible to decision fatigue (so-called “ego depletion”). The findings of this paper highlight pertinent cognitive and IO paths of the investment decision-making process that will allow others making similar types of investments to learn from and draw parallels from such processes.

Beschreibung: Construction firms are vulnerable to bankruptcy due to the complex nature of the industry, high competitions, the high risk involved, and considerable economic fluctuations. Thus, evaluating financial status and predicting business failures of construction companies are crucial for owners, general contractors, investors, banks, insurance firms, and creditors. The prediction results can be used to select qualified contractors capable of accomplishing the projects. In this study, a hybrid fuzzy instance-based classifier for contractor default prediction (FICDP) is proposed. The new approach is constructed by incorporating the fuzzy K -nearest neighbor classifier (FKNC), the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE), and the firefly algorithm (FA). In this hybrid paradigm, the FKNC is utilized to classify the contractors into two groups (“default” and “nondefault”) based on their past financial performances. Since the “nondefault” samples dominate the historical database, the SMOTE algorithm is employed to create synthetic samples of the minority class and therefore alleviates the between-class imbalance problem. Moreover, the FA is employed to determine an appropriate set of model parameters. Experimental results have shown that the proposed FICDP can outperform other benchmark methods.

Beschreibung: Reaching integrated agreement has been advocated to be the optimal outcome in dispute negotiation. When this is not achieved, the outcome is suboptimal and can be technically identified as a form of failure. This study introduces a fuzzy fault tree analysis (FFTA) approach to conceptualize the root causes of construction dispute negotiation failure. The FFTA framework also enables assessment of negotiation failure occurrence likelihood. Employing the proposed framework, an empirical study was conducted. The findings suggest that construction dispute negotiation failure is highly probable and the main causes are inadequate preparation , inappropriate behavior, and contract governance . These findings inform instigation of remedial and mitigation measures to address these root causes.

Beschreibung: We explain why companies seeking superior product innovation should invest in basic research. Our arguments highlight the role of absorptive capacity and examine how industry appropriability influences these relations. Based on a rich dataset of 8 416 firms, we argue that basic research in firms increases their knowledge stock and flows, therefore improving their capacity to identify, assimilate, and exploit external knowledge, which allows them to enhance their product innovation performance. We also verify that strong appropriability regimes not only reduce the effect of basic research on absorptive capacity, but also affect the relation between absorptive capacity and product innovation in two ways. In businesses with a high absorptive capacity, strong appropriability regimes exert a negative influence by reducing product innovation; however, businesses with a low absorptive capacity see their level of product innovation increase. This evidence not only throws into question the attitude of many managers toward basic research; it also calls for open reflection on both the net effect of appropriability on innovative performance and the stages of the innovation process to which public resources should be allocated.

Beschreibung: Prosperity of the online keyword auctions greatly facilitates the penetration of search-engine marketing in various industries. However, the current operation rules of the search engine make it very difficult for those inexperienced advertisers to make sound bids without the support of powerful tools. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to help advertisers understand such dynamic, infinite, and opaque auction situation, and obtain as good as possible bidding result. This paper, focusing on predicting the return on investment (ROI) of a keyword portfolio, develops a hierarchical Bayesian network (BN) model to forecast keyword auctions’ performance. Few papers directly predict the ROI of a keyword portfolio. This approach effectively echoes advertisers’ expectation for a keyword auction by choosing the right keywords and bids to achieve the desired outcome. The building blocks of the prediction model, such as bid and rank, are organized in a tree-shaped structure with a set of joint conditional probabilities. To infer the posterior probabilities of the predictors, a Bayesian parameter-learning algorithm is conducted after validating the network's structural relationships. The empirical study demonstrates that the prediction model is appropriate and effective for keyword auctions. Moreover, the proposed hierarchical BN model shows a higher accuracy than the popular prediction approach—the back-propagation artificial neural network.

Beschreibung: Project teams must be comprised of skilled individuals; however, project managers often face challenges when assigned team members have a shortage of skills. This potential for a project team's shortage of skill is expressed as project skill risk in this paper. When this occurs, project managers must identify the project team's skill status and take appropriate action. Hence, project managers should understand the skill status of a team and monitor this status in a timely manner, especially for a project that requires expertise. In addition, by understanding skill similarity among team members, project managers can reduce project skill risk. The method proposed in this study creates a systematized quantitative process to evaluate project skill risk in order to generate an objective understanding of team skill status so that decisions can be made proactively during the project planning and execution phases. The proposed method uses a skill risk fault tree and skill risk control chart. The skill risk fault tree is used to evaluate quantitative risk, whereas the skill risk control chart is used to visualize skill risk status. The proposed method incorporates skill similarity to allow for flexibility in project skill risk-related actions. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method are then verified through a case study involving an information technology system infrastructure transition project.

Beschreibung: Project management theory provides insufficient insight on the effects of crashing and overlapping in product development (PD) projects. The scholarly literature largely assumes that networks of project activities are acyclical. PD projects are iterative, however, and the time-cost implications of managerial actions, such as activity crashing and overlapping, differ in this context. We build a rich model that accounts for activity overlapping, crashing, and iteration in the project's activity network. Using a bank of thousands of artificial but realistic test problems, we test the performance of several alternative work policies —managerial rules about when to start work and rework, and when to allow crashing and overlapping—and compare their time-cost implications. We find that the time-cost benefits of crashing and overlapping increase with increasing iteration. However, whereas crashing works well in combination with an aggressive work policy that does not seek to minimize iteration and rework, overlapping ironically works better with a work policy that defers rework. No single work policy dominates in all situations, although an aggressive policy that precipitates rework may often be worth its added cost. We distill our findings into a set of propositions that pave the way for further theory development in this area. Our results also illuminate useful heuristics for managers of PD projects.

Beschreibung: Disseminating scientific findings through journal publications is the very nature of every academic discipline. However, with the emergence of knowledge society and lifelong learning needs, there is a growing demand for alternative ways to enhance the dissemination of research findings to a broader audience than academics and young students. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of serious games as a well-acknowledged alternative method to discourse and delivering current engineering or management-related research findings to society. Then, considering the lack of a unified serious game design framework and the gaps in the extant literature, we illustrate our design rationale for the development and evaluation of serious games. The proposed framework contributes the following advancements to the body of extant literature and practices. It is strongly centered on a well-known knowledge transfer framework, and it is strongly based on a participatory design approach deliberately involving iterative and frequent testing and fine-tuning sessions that overcome the inherent limitations of traditional stage-gate or waterfall development models. We conclude by providing some insights gained during the development of the game and the framework, as well as by discussing the challenges associated with the design and use of serious games as an alternative genre for disseminating engineering- and management-related research findings.

Beschreibung: Provides a notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Beschreibung: Autonomous strategic actions (ASA) can be a powerful source of strategic renewal. However, not much is known about what triggers middle- and lower-level members of an organization to engage in such bottom-up entrepreneurial activities. This paper aims at narrowing this gap. It empirically studies the role of autonomy and top-management support, as well as declining firm performance and their interplay in triggering middle managers’ ASA. Results suggest that the allocation of decision-making rights and the support of top management are important antecedents to ASA, while top-management support is also a moderator of the relationship between performance decline and ASA.

Beschreibung: Advertisement: Are you one of the 100,000+ IEEE members interested in working at the intersection of technology, engineering and management? The Technology Management Council is preparing for its transition into the Technology and Engineering Management Society (TEMS). TEMS will support and strengthen the careers of current and aspiring engineering and technology management professionals like you.

Beschreibung: Provides instructions and guidelines to prospective authors who wish to submit manuscripts.

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Beschreibung: In recent years, firms have pursued a host of environmental operational practices to derive superior environmental and business performance. However, the relative effectiveness of these practices has not been explored adequately. Past empirical studies have mainly assessed the performance impact of various practices across firms without accounting for firm-specific considerations. Consequently, it is not clear how the costs and benefits of various practices compare across firms that may weigh the practices differently. We examine this issue by analyzing the financial and environmental performance impact of five commonly adopted operational practices of 30 firms across a diverse set of industries. The operational practices are measured in interval scale through content analysis. Subsequently, we apply a data envelopment analysis-based technique proposed by Dehnokhalaji et al . [22] that can incorporate both ratio and interval-scale data. We find that although the emphases on various environmental practices vary among firms, mainly two of the five practices (i.e., proactive waste reduction and remanufacturing) differentiate firms’ business and environmental performance. The theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are also discussed.

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Beschreibung: Overlapping new product design process is widely applied in industry. However, selections of appropriate overlapping strategies based on the prediction of process performance can be problematic due to insufficient understanding on the dependence between design processes and its effect on the performance. This paper introduces a new model for a product design organization that is based on the evolving nature of the design process, the dependence between up and downstream design specifications, and the design technology being adopted. The model presents an evaluation method for quantifying the downstream evolutionary behavior. Through an industrial case study, it is applied to evaluate how the design performances vary under different overlapping strategies and how to determine an optimal overlapping; the results imply that the performance is contingent on the strategy, and no single strategy outperforms in overall performance measures. Furthermore, the model measures process dependency—a quantification of the downstream work that is indifferent to the change of the upstream. This quantification can be applied to determine the rework probability or rework function proposed by other studies. The model also addresses the rationale of how improving design technology efficiency can lead to an upgrading of design performances.

Beschreibung: Grade, due date, priority, and demand are attributes of magnetic material products. Planners are required to seek the optimal combination of production work orders to minimize cost and improve efficiency based on these attributes. The magnetic material group furnace optimization problem is a generalization of the 1-D bin-packing problem wherein bins of varying sizes are used. Bin sizes are determined by the grade and demand of the grouped work orders. A mathematical model is established to solve the magnetic material group furnace optimization problem by using a specialized genetic algorithm (SGA). In SGA, an initial population generation method is designed by following the sort criteria of the earliest completion date. The furnace charging weight is set according to several rules derived from work order attributes. An elite strategy and an improved greedy three-crossover operator are introduced to enhance convergence speed and precision. In addition, a reverse operator is applied to exploit the proposed algorithm. Simulation results based on practical production data show that the established model is suitable and that the presented algorithm is effective.

Beschreibung: Cross-functional teams are often seen as key for innovation projects. At the same time, functional diversity also introduces conflict, which may hinder a team's optimal performance. Most of the existing literature focuses on resolving and preventing these conflicts; however, conflict alone fails to explain why the contribution of these teams to performance is found to be absent in certain types of firms. This paper investigates the moderating role of organizational context on the relationship between cross-functional teams and performance. A multilevel sample of 142 projects in 95 firms is used to demonstrate that cross-functionality contributes to the performance of innovation projects in more functionally organized firms, with a separate innovation unit, and above-average levels of organizational connectedness. Other types of organizations may want to reconsider the use of cross-functional teams for their innovation projects.

Beschreibung: Despite the general agreement of the importance of resources and capabilities to strategic change, the broader question of how resources and capabilities affect strategic change itself remains unresolved. This research focuses on one characteristic of the process of strategic change, i.e., its speed. This study investigates the relationship between dynamic capabilities, the speed of strategic change, and performance. We propose that technological capabilities, marketing capabilities, and market-linking capabilities, due to their absorptive capacity and boundary spanning attributes, will facilitate the speed of strategic change. Furthermore, the risk orientation of managers will moderate this effect such that it would be strengthened for relatively risk-taking managers. Finally, we argue that the speed of strategic change will have an inverted-U relationship with organizational performance. We test these hypotheses on a sample of 213 Chinese firms and find that while dynamic capabilities facilitate rapid strategic change, the risk orientation of decision makers moderates this relationship, but not all as hypothesized. While faster implementation of strategic change has a positive effect on performance, strategic change carried out too quickly has negative performance repercussions. Our findings suggest that firms not only need to adjust strategies to complement the changing environment, but also have corresponding capabilities to enable rapid strategic change.

Beschreibung: A well-planned service innovation strategy is recognized as a prerequisite for successful service innovation in organizations. However, prior studies on service innovation strategies struggle to provide guidance on successful service innovation, because they do not consider the alignment between service innovation strategy and business strategy. Furthermore, they did not consider conditions, such as industries, that affect the alignments to improve firm performance. By using empirical data collected from 175 service firms in Korea, this study aims to investigate the effect of alignments between service innovation strategy (i.e., service creation-focused [SCFS], service delivery-focused [SDFS], and customer interaction-focused [CIFS] strategies) and business strategy (i.e., cost leadership [CLS], innovative differentiation [IDS], and focus [FS] strategies) on firm performance, which is assessed using both nonfinancial and financial measures. We then examine how the effect of alignments differs depending on industry types (i.e., scale intensive [SCIS], technology-based knowledge intensive [TKIS], and professional-based knowledge intensive service industries [PKIS]). Empirical evidence indicates that three alignment patterns (i.e., SCFS-IDS pattern, SDFS-CLS pattern, and CIFS-FS pattern) have synergistic effects on firm performance. Results also confirm that the effects of the alignments on firm performance differ according to the types of industry. The SCFS-IDS alignment performs well in the TKIS group, the SDFS-CLS alignment in the SCIS group, and the CIFS-FS alignment in the PKIS group. The implications for practice highlight the idea that successful service innovation requires judicious alignment between service innovation strategy and business strategy with the consideration of industries.

Beschreibung: Despite the extensive application of Monte Carlo analytic hierarchy process (MCAHP) in various fields of decision making, its performance has not been compared with the classic analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Both of these methods are heavily affected by individual or group preferences and thus provide subjective rankings. Since the mere difference between their results does not necessarily warrant the superiority of one against the other, a reliable and robust ranking of alternatives should be available as a comparison basis so that the results of these two methods can be evaluated. In this paper, we use a simulation approach to compare the results of AHP with MCAHP under different levels of uncertainty. We validate our simulation results by comparing the performance of these two alternatives against a real world and reliable ranking of blogs. Our simulation results show that as long as the variation in different pairwise comparisons is less than 0.24, the performance of AHP is not statistically different from the performance of MCAHP. When the uncertainty in terms of variation grows beyond 0.24, MCAHP provides more precise rankings. The findings of this research add to the current body of knowledge in the multicriteria decision analysis as well as Information Systems literature and provide insights for managerial applications of these techniques.

Beschreibung: This paper presents a stylized framework for analyzing the design of government incentives for public interest goods (goods with externalities, such as electric vehicles.) We extend the newsvendor model with pricing to account for the consumption externality inherent in public interest goods and analyze the governments ability to coordinate their pricing and supply through the use of rebates and subsidies. Our model allows for goods with both positive and negative externalities, and considers three government intervention mechanisms: the joint mechanism that uses both subsidies and rebates, and two simplified mechanisms that use only rebates or only subsidies. The goal of the intervention is to coordinate the system in order to achieve the maximal welfare, which in our model consists of the firms profit, consumer surplus, and externality benefit net the government cost. We find that the joint mechanism coordinates the system, but results in a negative subsidy (i.e., a tax) unless the externality is very small. The simplified mechanisms mostly result in positive rebates and subsidies, but generally do not coordinate the system. We apply our model to the case of Chevy Volt, a leading electric vehicle in North America manufactured by General Motors. We estimate all model parameters from industry data and present a comprehensive numerical study that compares the current government incentives with those suggested by our model. We find that while the current incentives are structurally suboptimal, the resultant welfare loss under the rebate-only mechanism is very small, while under the subsidy-only mechanism it is quite large.

Beschreibung: Using four case studies of the response of the international community to major rapid onset natural disasters, this paper analyzes the advantages and challenges inherent in the provision of logistics support through the use of a floating warehouse; otherwise known as “sea basing.” Through a comparison of the costs and benefits of the use of alternative sea-basing models with the actual cost of air transport incurred, this paper demonstrates that the use of sea basing would offer responding agencies significant cost and flexibility benefits, and that the concept has the potential to be extended significantly through the use of a bespoke vessel rather than a standard commercial container ship.

Beschreibung: Product innovation strategies of emerging market companies are increasingly challenging conventional wisdom. Drawing on a qualitative case study of Mahindra Reva, the only electric vehicle producer in India, this paper explores how a bricolage strategy enabled a resource-constrained emerging market firm to deliver affordable, innovative, and high-tech products with minimal capital investments. The findings of this study illustrate how multiple forms of bricolage can be implemented and managed at organizational and interorganizational levels. They show how different bricolage activities relate to different stages of the new product development process, and further, highlight the complementarities between bricolage and engineering activities. This paper argues that bricolage, which is typically regarded as a behavioral trait or skill that allows entrepreneurs and innovators to operate in challenging environments, can also be a carefully planned and executed strategy conducive to innovation. Thus, it suggests that a cost-effective bricolage strategy can underpin emerging market companies' development of discontinuity-creating and market disrupting technology products.

Beschreibung: The design structure matrix (DSM), also called the dependency structure matrix, has become a widely used modeling framework across many areas of research and practice. The DSM brings advantages of simplicity and conciseness in representation, and, supported by appropriate analysis, can also highlight important patterns in system architectures (design structures), such as modules and cycles. A literature review in 2001 cited about 100 DSM papers; there have been over 1000 since. Thus, it is useful to survey the latest DSM extensions and innovations to help consolidate progress and identify promising opportunities for further research. This paper surveys the DSM literature, primarily from archival journals, and organizes the developments pertaining to building, displaying, analyzing, and applying product, process, and organization DSMs. It then addresses DSM applications in other domains, as well as recent developments with domain mapping matrices (DMMs) and multidomain matrices (MDMs). Overall, DSM methods are becoming more mainstream, especially in the areas of engineering design, engineering management, management/organization science, and systems engineering. Despite significant research contributions, however, DSM awareness seems to be spreading more slowly in the realm of project management.

Beschreibung: Given the continued economic pressure on information technology (IT) organizations, the effective and efficient delivery of IT remains a crucial issue for IT executives in order to optimize their department's performance. Due to company specifics, however, an absolute assessment of IT organizations' performance has often proven difficult in the past. Consequently, many IT executives revert to comparative assessments such as IT benchmarking. IT benchmarking has been increasingly used to support IT management, also on a strategic level. While past research on such strategic IT benchmarking (SITBM) often focused on process models and optimal peer group composition, many practitioners repeatedly report problems with identifying or developing suitable methods for collecting the data needed for SITBM. We introduce a design theory for SITBM methods and illustrate how we derived the theory from an SITBM project over a period of ten years. During that time, the method from which we abstract our design theory was applied in 102 different companies. We contribute to practice and theory by not only reporting a field-tested method for SITBM, but also by providing a design theoretical basis on how to develop such a method as a blueprint for IT managers that want to set up an SITBM.

Beschreibung: Being “green” is socially, desirable, yet whether it pays to be “green” is unclear. This question has become more important to manufacturing industries as environmental concerns are escalating, particularly in emerging economies. We examine the effects of green process innovation on the financial performance of manufacturing industries with a focus on the moderating effects of government subsidies versus industries' own absorptive capability. Using sulfur dioxide emissions as an environmental index, we establish a dynamic model using ten years panel data from 28 industries in China where environmental concerns have been severe and government subsidies have been commonly believed to be instrumental. The results show that clean technologies and end-of-pipe technologies are positively related to financial performance at the industry level, thus it pays to be “green.” Furthermore, strong absorptive capacity tends to enhance this relationship, but surprisingly green subsidies turn out to weaken this relationship. We also find the effects are different between clean technologies and end-of-pile technologies, which leads to finer grained insights into these two types of technologies and their adoption. We conclude that manufacturing industries can benefit more from green process innovation by leveraging their internal absorptive capability, as opposed to replying on external government subsidies as commonly believed. Our findings provide finer grained insights on the benefits of green process innovation, and shed light on the study of green process innovation in other emerging economies.