NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT, R&D, PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Mission Statement
Innovation and new product development are major drivers of growth, renewal, and competitive advantage for firms across all industries. For the purposes of this department, this includes product, process, service, and business-model innovation, identification and commercialization of new technologies, the management of research, and the design, engineering, and introduction of new offerings.

 

At the heart of successful innovation lies sophisticated project management, the management of discrete activities with defined deliverables and end points, where the activities are in some way new or unique. We are interested in all aspects of project management, including applications outside product development (e.g., large scale engineering and infrastructure undertakings, or startups).

 

While the department approaches innovation and new product development with an Operations orientation, emphasizing processes and execution, designing successful new products is inherently cross disciplinary, and therefore we encourage close ties to other disciplines, including the following:

• Accounting (e.g., performance measurement and incentives)
• Economics (e.g., incentives, R&D races, industrial organization)
• Engineering (much work on product development is carried out, for example, in industrial, mechanical or electrical engineering)
• Finance (e.g., risk management and financing)
• Marketing (e.g., listening to the customer, product features, market development)
• Organizational Behavior and Sociology (e.g., information processing, coordination, structure and motivation)
• Strategy (e.g., industry evolution and the role of innovation, competitive advantage, alliances).

 

It is the mission of this department to publish articles that offer important insights into the management of product innovation. Modeling, empirical data analysis, or grounded theory methodologies are all welcome. The hurdles for acceptance are:

• The article should offer a new idea, not just an incremental twist on previous work.
• The results of the article should be managerially relevant. This means that the results can be translated into some useful managerial practice or decision rule.
• Whatever the research method chosen, it should fulfill a high standard of rigor.

 

We will emphasize innovativeness: if a manuscript offers an interesting new idea but does not quite live up to the highest rigor, we will work with the author to achieve a higher methodological standard, and then publish the manuscript.

 

Departmental Editor

 

Professor Glen Schmidt
University of Utah
glen.schmidt@utah.edu

 

 

 

 

Senior Editors

Sreekumar Bhaskaran, Southern Methodist University
Pascale Crama, Singapore Management University
Sanjiv Erat, University of California at San Diego
Stylianos Kavadias, Cambridge University
Karim R. Lakhani, Harvard University
Svenja Sommer, HEC Paris
Manuel Sosa, INSEAD
Fabian Sting, Universität Köln
Sezer Ulku, Georgetown University
Yi Xu, University of Maryland