This research builds on three projects that aim to investigate how knowledge transfer takes place in new product development in the automotive industry. The study seeks to picture how product development teams frame and shape new product knowledge, how they interpret such knowledge, and how they apply knowledge to the product development process. From that perspective, product development activities can be seen as transactions that are integrated into an overall system of identifying, assessing, collecting and combining knowledge. Results of my research so far reveal that there are many factors that affect the successful management of knowledge transfer in new product development projects. Based on my first two projects, using the case study approach, it is evident that for successful knowledge transfer to occur, there is a need to distinguish between design knowledge that is embedded in the tacit knowledge domain and that embedded in the or explicit design knowledge domain. The results of project three, using a survey questionnaire approach, provide a powerful demonstration, that knowledge integration, combination and creation in product development need intensive interaction and collaboration. The enormous importance of interaction and collaboration to integrate and combine knowledge has its origin in the nature of design knowledge. For example engineers produced in the survey a 82 % rate of agreement with the statement that they use mainly knowledge that comes from their past work experience as product developers, in order to solve complex design tasks. The underlying assumption of this finding is, that engineers are therefore mostly forced to transfer tacit design knowledge to solve complex design tasks. The research showed that a remarkable under-performance exists in knowledge identification and knowledge articulation in new product development in the automotive industry. In vehicle development, non-routine tasks are highly complex. This requires team members to have an understanding of the complete product system architecture. To create such an understanding, engineers need to identify and articulate knowledge. These activities can be seen as a pre-knowledge creation. The result is a shared product knowledge base, which makes it possible for people engaged in the vehicle development process to use different kinds of knowledge to capture and link new technologies into innovative products. This may require a cultural shift by vehicle manufacturers in terms of how they steer and allocate resources to future vehicle development programmes. Building on four years engagement with knowledge transfer research, I conclude that organisations in the automotive sector still rely on methods and processes that were successful in the past and strictly directed at exploiting tangible assets. To integrate preknowledge creation, as a new found discipline in product development projects creates an enormous potential to integrate and combine knowledge in an efficient way for future product development projects.

This thesis describes the total synthesis of the thiopeptide antibiotic micrococcin P1. It unambiguously elucidates its structure, which has been subject to controversy for over thirty years. The centerpiece of the route to the target molecule is a facile one-pot construction of the central thiazole/pyridine cluster developed in our laboratory. This highlyconvergent route entails a delicate Michael addition to yield a Hantzsch dihydropyridine intermediate, which undergoes further oxidation to the fully aromatised heterocycle. The synthesis was completed by the coupling of this core with a highly-modified sensitive peptide chain. The modular nature of the synthesis can also accommodate modifications for SAR studies, contributing thereby to the fields of medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and microbiology. At a purely chemical level, we remain confident that this work will serve as a valuable guide in the elaboration of other members of the thiopeptide family.

When a telecommunication company delivers a product to a customer, three main pieces are included: software, hardware and Customer Product Information (CPI). The CPI can be thought of as the “user manual” for the product. The CPI is important to most companies. It is important not only that the final product really corresponds to the needs of the customer, but also that the customer in an easy manner can learn how to install, configure and subsequently use the product. To provide this information to the customer, a correct content and a good information structure of the CPI is crucial. To ensure this, the studied company has developed a “Customer Product Information Life Cycle Process” to enhance the understanding of the customer needs in terms of documentation and training material about the product and comply with customer needs.  Part of this thesis consists of a study which makes an evaluation of the development parts of the CPI process. This is done in order to find a method and tool to be able to improve the structure, content and usability of the CPI used in a product called Gateway GPRS support Node (GGSN). The conclusions from the study are implemented with a Content Management System (CMS). One important aim is to use a wiki-type tool where the customer can make local adaptation to the delivered CPI and add information about their own network, configurations and handling; in this way they will be able to make the CPI structure more users friendly and used more efficiently by the customer’s staff. As part of this thesis, a test was carried out to suggest a new model to improve the current CPI model used at the company. The test was based on a methodology, tool-independent CMS called Drupal. Drupal was used to create test documents in the GGSN-MPG CPI environment. The quality of the CPI made with the Drupal tool was examined after the change. The results clearly demonstrate that a new portal platform, based on a Drupal-like tool achieves a far more flexible structure and would greatly improve the CPI capabilities. It is preferable to use a Drupal-like portal platform rather than a website when implementing a new CPI structure.

In recent years, numerous methods to aid designers in conceptualizing new products have been developed. These methods intend to give structure to a process that was, at one time, considered to be a purely creative exercise. Resulting from the study, implementation, and refinement of design methodologies is the notion that both the structure of the development process and the structure of the developed product are key factors in creating value in a firm’s product line. With respect to the latter key factor, product architecture, but more specifically, modular product architecture has been the subject of much study. However, prior research in the area of modular product architecture has, with limited exception, focused on the construction of modules that are to be incorporated into a product before it becomes available to its end-users; that is, the modules are incorporated ‘pre-market.’ The research contained in this thesis is focused on two tasks: advancing the notion of a modular product architecture in which modules can be incorporated into a product ‘post-market,’ and creating a method that aids designers in synthesizing these post-market modules. Researchers have examined the idea of post-market modules; however, they do not fully formalize language used to describe these modules, and they also do not give the product space created by post-market modularization well-defined boundaries. Additionally, the prior work gives no method that can be used to create post-market modules. The research presented here addresses these shortcomings in the prior work by first, defining the terms ‘derivative product’ and ‘host product’ to describe the post-market module and the product that the module augments, respectively. Second, by establishing three guidelines that are used to assess the validity of potential derivative products, giving the newly termed host and derivative product space defined boundaries. And lastly, by developing a 7-step, biomimetic-based methodology that can be used to create derivative product concepts (post-market modules). This developed methodology is applied to four case studies in which it is used to create five derivative product concepts for a given host product. Thus, 20 derivative product concepts are developed in this study, demonstrating the qualitative effectiveness of the 7-step methodology.

The chemical constituents of EtOH extracts of the soft coral Sinularia sp. have led to the isolation of nature compounds¡]1-12¡^,sinularioperoxides A-D¡]1-4¡^, sinulariolins A-D¡]5-8¡^, 1a,3b-Dihydroxy-24-methylencholesta-5,9-diene¡]9¡^,¡]3S¡^-3,7-Dimethyl-nona- 6,8-dienoicacid¡]10¡^, ¡]2¢S¡^-Ethyl¡]5¢E¡^-5-(2¢,6¢-dimethylocta-5¢,7¢-dienyl)furan-3-carboxylate¡]11¡^, and one know metabolite, 3'R,4'-((2R, 4S)-2-hydroxy-4-acetoxy-2,6,6-trimethyl-cyclohexylidene)but-3'-en-2'-one¡]12¡^, respectively. Compounds 1-11 are new and 12 is a know metabolite, which had been isolated from the brown alga and the plant. The structures of 1-12 were elucidated by the interpretation of spectroscopic data¡]UV, MS, IR, 1D and 2D NMR¡^.

New product innovation strategy is always be the best way for corporations to enhance earning. A lot of essays have discussed the benefits of innovation strategy and the factors that make innovation strategy successful. However, different innovation degree creates different effects and costs. By former researchs, the higher degree of innovation dosen¡¦t guarantee the huger of profit. Therefore, knowing the decision procerss of new product innovation is realy important and worthful. In this article, we divide new products into two groups with different innovation degree: the minor innovation product (incremental innovation product) and the major innovation product (radical innovation product). By using real options analysis method, we build a evaluation model to estimate the new product value during the procerss of new product innovation. We also go into what factors will influence the corporations¡¦ decision. Furthermore, we do the sensitivity analysis with numerical method and to realize corporations¡¦ preference and tendency in product innovation decision. At last, we use the real option evaluation model to analyze some product innovation cases in Taiwan.

none

Product line extension is considered a low-cost, low-risk strategy of introducing products under the same category. Under product line extension strategy, however, manufactures and retailers usually advertise merely one product during a certain period, rather than advertising all products within the product line at the same time. Taking example of Coke Cola, it keeps extending its product line horizontally in the past years. There are Classic, Diet and Zero Coke belonging to the main product line. As we observed, Coke Cola seldom advertised for three products simultaneously. On the contrary, to highly impress consumers, only one product would be strongly promoted in a certain period. What is interesting is whether the advertisement of Zero Coke lowers the price that Classic Coke buyers are prepared to pay toward Classic Coke while zero calorie is highly emphasized in ads. It would be interesting to investigate the impact of product line advertisement on consumers to see whether the product line advertisement always brings positive influence on reference price toward consumers with different purchase purposes. This research addressed the question of how product-line advertisement influences consumer¡¦s reference price within vertical and horizontal product line. It combined the research of product line extension and the concept of reference price to give advice for marketing. The category of product used in experiment is durable that was suggested in prior study. To examine the relationship between product-line advertisement and reference price, experimental method was performed here to test different kind of product line advertisement toward consumers with different purpose purposes, buying high-end product, low-end product or one certain product belonging to the horizontal product line. The results indicated that within the vertical product line, the brand advertisement with low-end product decreases the reference price toward high-end product buyers whereas the informational advertisement with low-end product increases the reference price toward high-end product buyers. Besides, within the horizontal product line, both of the brand and informational advertisement with one certain product in horizontal product line decreases the reference price toward the buyer who would like to buy another product belonging to the same product line.

Thesis (M.S.)--Youngstown State University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-96). Also available via the World Wide Web in PDF format.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Sept. 21, 2009). Advisor: Michael Hu. Keywords: brand alliance, consumer ethnocentrism, integrated congruence, partner brands Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-110).