Dramatically reducing cycle times through flash development

The reduction of cycle time has emerged as a fundamental element of new product development strategy. Many companies look solely at speed enhancement and increase the human, capital and technical resources allocated to development projects. However, additional resources do not guarantee significant reductions in cycle time. As well as speed enhancement activities, there exist two other sets of activities that are key to shortening the development cycle: those that act to prevent delays (friction) in the development process and those that define the scope of the final outcome (direction). This paper describes flash development as an alternative approach to reducing product development cycle times. Flash development works by creating a process that focuses on speed, friction and direction. The process is illustrated through an analysis of the Galileo Project at Nortel Networks.     

A spanning heuristic for the unordered and ordered matching identification problem

The matching identification problem (MIP) is a combinatoric search problem related to the fields of learning from examples, boolean functions, and knowledge acquisition. The MIP involves identifying a single “goal” item from a large set of items. Because there is commonly a cost associated with evaluating each guess, the goal item should be identified in as few guesses as possible. As in most search problems, the items have a similar structure, which allows an evaluation of each guessed item. In other words, each guessed item elicits partial information about the goal item, i.e. how similar the guess is to the goal. With this information the goal is more quickly identified.The unordered MIP has been studied by Mehrez and Steinberg (ORSA J. Comput. 7 (1995) 211) in which they proposed two different types of algorithms. The purpose of the present paper is to suggest an improved Spanning Heuristic algorithm. Its improvement increases as the problem size increases. Further results and comparisons are derived for the unordered and ordered cases.This research shows that when the search space is very large, it is better to inquire from items that are known not to be the goal (they have been ruled out by previous guesses), for the purpose of acquiring more information about the goal. As the search space is narrowed, it is better to guess items that have not been ruled out.     

Managerial Involvement and Perceptions of Strategy Process

Prior academic research attests to both positive and negative effects of involvement on the process of developing strategy. On the one hand, it has been argued that involvement strengthens shared vision, increases rationality and improves adaptiveness in strategy-making. On the other hand, involvement is said to lead to intense political behaviour, increased cultural inertia and more constraints in the strategy process. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative importance of these effects. In a survey of over 6,000 managers, we find that their reported levels of involvement are positively associated with perceptions of strategy development processes that are more rational, more focused by a shared vision, and more adaptive. In addition, involvement is negatively associated with statements describing the process as top-down, influenced by politics and slowed by internal culture. Moreover, those who are more involved tend to see business and non-business constraints as less important in determining strategy. We argue that these associations between involvement and desirable features of strategy process are important because perceptions are the basis of managerial behaviour. Thus, managers who are more involved in strategy not only see the process in a more favourable light but also act in ways that make the process more effective. The main implication of these findings is that for most organisations increasing involvement improves the strategy process.     

The Blinders of Dominant Logic

This article argues that the dominant logic embedded in an organisation may keep it on the road ahead, but it also acts as a blinder to peripheral vision. It says that managers need to look at beyond the borders of their industries and geographies to find new opportunities and rethink the logic of the business. It refers to corporate examples where shifts in organisations’ dominant logic allowed traditional assumptions about value creation to be reassessed and resulted in successful forays into the periphery.     

Mining the Periphery for New Products

Revolutionary products often come from upstart players or companies outside the industry, while mainstream operators follow a risk-averse path of concentrating on their current business. This article urges companies to channel resources into looking at the periphery for ideas that could be profit-drivers of the future. It suggests three strategies for finding new products: frame the landscape; develop game-changing hypotheses; and use targeted hunting. It concludes by saying that these approaches will encourage managers to combine broad searching and thinking with focused evaluation and execution.