37,581 research outputs found
The Optimal Pace of Product Updates
Some firms (such as Intel and Medtronics) use a time–pacing strategy for new product development, introducing new generations at regular intervals. If the firm adopts a fast pace (introducing frequently) then it prematurely cannibalizes its old generation and incurs high development costs, while if it waits too long, it fails to capitalize on customer willingness–to–pay for more advanced technology. We develop a model to gain insight into which factors drive the pace. We consider the degree to which a new generation stimulates market growth, the rate at which it diffuses (its coefficients of innovation and imitation), the rate of decline in its margin over time, and the cost of new product development. The optimization problem is non–concave; however we are able to solve it numerically for a wide range of parameters because there is a finite number of possible solutions for each case. Somewhat intuitively, we find that a faster pace is associated with a higher market growth rate and faster margin decay. Not so intuitively, we find that relatively minor differences in the new product development cost function can significantly impact the optimal pace. Regarding the Bass coefficients of innovation and imitation, we find that a higher sum of these coefficients leads to a faster pace but with diminishing effects, and that for relatively higher sums the coefficients are effectively substitutes
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Challenges and Opportunities to Updating Prescribing Information for Longstanding Oncology Drugs.
A number of important drugs used to treat cancer-many of which serve as the backbone of modern chemotherapy regimens-have outdated prescribing information in their drug labeling. The Food and Drug Administration is undertaking a pilot project to develop a process and criteria for updating prescribing information for longstanding oncology drugs, based on the breadth of knowledge the cancer community has accumulated with the use of these drugs over time. This article highlights a number of considerations for labeling updates, including selecting priorities for updating; data sources and evidentiary criteria; as well as the risks, challenges, and opportunities for iterative review to ensure prescribing information for oncology drugs remains relevant to current clinical practice
Consensus-based approach to peer-to-peer electricity markets with product differentiation
With the sustained deployment of distributed generation capacities and the
more proactive role of consumers, power systems and their operation are
drifting away from a conventional top-down hierarchical structure. Electricity
market structures, however, have not yet embraced that evolution. Respecting
the high-dimensional, distributed and dynamic nature of modern power systems
would translate to designing peer-to-peer markets or, at least, to using such
an underlying decentralized structure to enable a bottom-up approach to future
electricity markets. A peer-to-peer market structure based on a Multi-Bilateral
Economic Dispatch (MBED) formulation is introduced, allowing for
multi-bilateral trading with product differentiation, for instance based on
consumer preferences. A Relaxed Consensus+Innovation (RCI) approach is
described to solve the MBED in fully decentralized manner. A set of realistic
case studies and their analysis allow us showing that such peer-to-peer market
structures can effectively yield market outcomes that are different from
centralized market structures and optimal in terms of respecting consumers
preferences while maximizing social welfare. Additionally, the RCI solving
approach allows for a fully decentralized market clearing which converges with
a negligible optimality gap, with a limited amount of information being shared.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Power System
The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation
Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post
Interactive Co-Design of Form and Function for Legged Robots using the Adjoint Method
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the
domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal,
we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to
design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors by specifying
higher level descriptions. The core of our method is a design optimization
technique that reasons about the structure, and motion of a robot in coupled
manner in order to achieve user-specified robot behavior, and performance. We
are inspired by the recent works that also aim to jointly optimize robot's form
and function. However, through efficient computation of necessary design
changes, our approach enables us to keep user-in-the-loop for interactive
applications. We evaluate our system in simulation by automatically improving
robot designs for multiple scenarios. Starting with initial user designs that
are physically infeasible or inadequate to perform the user-desired task, we
show optimized designs that achieve user-specifications, all while ensuring an
interactive design flow.Comment: 8 pages; added link of the accompanying vide
Technology Adoption, Turbulence and the Dynamics of Unemployment
The divergence of unemployment rates between the U.S. and Europe coincided with a substantial acceleration in capital-embodied technical change in the late 70’s. Furthermore, evidence suggests that European economies have been lagging behind the U.S. in the adoption and usage of new technologies. This paper argues that the pace of technology adoption plays a fundamental role for how an economy’s labor market reacts to an acceleration in capital-embodied growth. The framework proposed offers an appealing and novel explanation for the divergence of unemployment rates across economies that are hit by the very same shock (i.e. the acceleration in embodied technical change) but differ in their technology adoption behavior. Moreover, we challenge the conventional wisdom that high European unemployment is the result of institutional rigidities by claiming that institutions are not the principal cause per se but they rather amplify certain forces that promote the emergence of high unemployment.Unemployment, Labor Market Search and Matching, Turbulence, Skill Loss, Technology Adoption, Training
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