An investigation of glass-fibre-reinforced polyamide 66 during conditioning in various automotive fluids

Injection moulded glass-fiber reinforced polyamide 66 composites and unreinforced polymer samples have been characterised during conditioning up to 900 hours in water, ethylene glycol and water-glycol mixture at 50°C and 70°C. All materials showed significant fluid and temperature dependent weight and volume increase. Glass reinforcement significantly reduced the polymer fluid uptake. The absorption of the antifreeze mixture initially follows a simple rule of mixtures of the absorption of the two individual components. However, after absorption of approximately 5% a significantly higher than predicted level of antifreeze absorption was observed. This coincided with a significant increase in the volumetric swelling coefficient. Dynamic mechanical analysis and unnotched impact testing indicated significant changes in composite mechanical performance dependent on conditioning fluid and temperature

Sustaining Technology Leadership Can Require Both Cost Competence and Innovative Competence

Some firms, particularly in high-tech, appear to view technology leadership and cost leadership as separate and distinct ways of achieving high profits within a given product market. In contrast, we develop a model of technology competition suggesting that a firm's success in sustaining its technology leadership may hinge on its ability to produce the new product (resulting from the new technology) at lower cost, an ability we call the firm's "cost competence." In our model, cost competence, above a critical hurdle level, is essential to the incumbent firm in its bid to retain technology leadership. The model also clarifies the role of "innovative competence," which characterizes a firm's ability to turn an investment in new technology into a marketable product. We present an example of a standard product market model (for determining prices and production quantities for two competing products in the aftermath of the technology competition) in which the assumptions of our technology competition model hold. An additional key finding is that there can be discontinuities in the returns that accrue from enhanced cost competence. If a firm is on the right side of a "jump point," its expected profits can be dramatically more than if it were only slightly less competent. These jump points arise where the firm's cost competence becomes sufficient to cause a competitor to decide against competing in the new technology, or to significantly drop its investment amount. When a potential competitor backs down, the prospect of high returns for the incumbent opens up.manufacturing strategy, cost competence, product innovation, process innovation, technological change, technology leadership

The Impact of an Integrated Marketing and Manufacturing Innovation

Suppose you are a Marketing Manager envisioning a new product, or an Operations Manager contemplating a process improvement, or a CEO who commissioned an integrated new product development team. If our assumptions hold, our model offers you a single numerical measure, called the degree of product/process innovation, to determine your initiative's impact on potential sales, prices, market segments, and profits. Our simple, single-period model is a variation of the existing vertically differentiated products model: There are two competing substitute products, and customers will buy at most one of them. Our contribution is to allow new relationships between the valuations of the two products by potential customers, and to allow differing unit production costs. We identify equilibrium results when two competing firms each offer one product, and find the profit maximizing result when one (monopolistic) firm offers both products. The new product infringes on the market in one of two ways: High-end encroachment results when the new product attracts the best customers (those with the highest reservation prices), while low-end encroachment identifies a situation where the new product attracts fringe (lower-end) customers. Low-end encroachment may help explain why an incumbent sometimes fails to recognize the threat of an entrant's product, as we illustrate with an example from the disk drive industry. In short, we offer insight into the value of both a marketing objective (enhancing the product design attributes) and a manufacturing goal (lowering the production cost) in a product and/or process improvement project.degree of product/process innovation, low-end encroachment, high-end encroachment, reservation price, disruptive technology, operations strategy, vertically differentiated products