Unlocking the power of big data in new product development

This study explores how big data can be used to enable customers to express unrecognised needs. By acquiring this information, managers can gain opportunities to develop customer-centred products. Big data can be defined as multimedia-rich and interactive low-cost information resulting from mass communication. It offers customers a better understanding of new products and provides new, simplified modes of large-scale interaction between customers and firms. Although previous studies have pointed out that firms can better understand customers’ preferences and needs by leveraging different types of available data, the situation is evolving, with increasing application of big data analytics for product development, operations and supply chain management. In order to utilise the customer information available from big data to a larger extent, managers need to identify how to establish a customer-involving environment that encourages customers to share their ideas with managers, contribute their know-how, fiddle around with new products, and express their actual preferences. We investigate a new product development project at an electronics company, STE, and describe how big data is used to connect to, interact with and involve customers in new product development in practice. Our findings reveal that big data can offer customer involvement so as to provide valuable input for developing new products. In this paper, we introduce a customer involvement approach as a new means of coming up with customer-centred new product development

Mind the gap: Balancing alliance network and technology portfolios during periods of technological uncertainty

While clique-embeddedness is generally considered to enhance firm performance, there are also reasons to expect that under conditions of technological turbulence clique-membership is less beneficial or might even become a liability. To address this, we study the innovative performance of clique members during periods of both technological change and technological stability. We find support for the idea that companies’ ability to adapt their alliance network (i.e. forming ties beyond the scope of the clique) and their ability to adapt their technology portfolios (i.e. access to novel technological knowledge) positively influences their innovative performance during technologically turbulent periods

Commodity Eats Innovation for Breakfast: A Model for Differentiating Feature Realization

Once supporting the electrical and mechanical functionality, software today became the main competitive advantage in products. However, in the companies that we study, the way in which software features are developed still reflects the traditional ‘requirements over the wall’ approach. As a consequence, individual departments prioritize what they believe is the most important and are unable to identify which features are regularly used – ‘flow’, there to be bought – ‘wow’, differentiating and that add value to customers, or which are regarded commodity. In this paper, and based on case study research in three large software-intensive companies, we (1) provide empirical evidence that companies do not distinguish between different types of features, which causes poor allocation of R&D efforts and suppresses innovation, and (2) develop a model in which we depict the activities for differentiating and working with different types of features and stakeholders

Building information modelling in construction: insights from collaboration and change management perspectives

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. A case study is used to obtain the experiences from a contractor and their subcontractors involved with constructing the landmark Perth Stadium, which required a building information model (BIM) to be delivered for the purpose of asset management. Insights about ‘how’ the adoption of a BIM influenced the practice of collaboration and change management within the project are obtained. It was revealed that having limited experience and knowledge to deliver a model for asset management often resulted the project team ‘muddling through a problem’. This was not necessarily due to a shortage of training, but a lack of BIM knowledge, which inadvertently influenced every day practice. The research presented builds on the extant body of works that have examined how the construction industry can effectively acquire the benefits of BIM for asset management. It also highlights the need to incorporate education and learning into a project’s BIM implementation strategy

The house That Google built? power and progress under construction 4.0

Construction 4.0 is bringing digitization, innovation, and new technologies, and changing the way we design, plan, and construct our projects. Such change impacts ‘traditional’ ways of working as it actively seeks to disrupt the norm and so enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of construction project delivery. However, technology is not neutral, as it brings both intended and unintended consequences to practice, not least due to the fundamental asymmetries of power latent in the adaptation of new technologies, and the largely autonomous (and often unchallengeable) role granted to technology as the harbinger of ‘progress.’ Here we specifically explore how Construction 4.0 may impact power relationships within our industry, aiming to stimulate debate and discussion by presenting a challenge to the technocratic optimism and determinism that currently surrounds it in practice. For the construction industry, there are potentially dramatic consequences for clients, architects, engineers and site managers, and workers, as their roles shift and reshape to suit technological requirements. Indeed, a new role, the ‘technology owner’, may become more powerful than any traditional profession in the future, as they become dominant actors within the construction industry space. Here we draw on the industrial revolutions of the past, and the wider contexts of this technological change to consider how our industry may itself change in the future. By exploring Construction 4.0 in this way, changes in power, roles, identity, and practice can be unpacked, and generate findings able to inform future research agendas and the practical management of Construction 4.0 adoption within our industry