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Global marketing managers are keenly interested in being able to predict the sales of their new products. Understanding how a product is adopted over time allows the managers to optimally allocate their resources. With the world becoming ever more global, there are strong and complex interactions between the countries in the world. My work explores how to describe the relationship between those countries and determines the best way to leverage that information to improve the sales predictions. In Chapter II, I describe how diffusion speed has changed over time. The most recent major study on this topic, by Christophe Van den Bulte, investigated new product di ffusions in the United States. Van den Bulte notes that a similar study is needed in the international context, especially in developing countries. Additionally, his model contains the implicit assumption that the diffusion speed parameter is constant throughout the life of a product. I model the time component as a nonparametric function, allowing the speed parameter the flexibility to change over time. I find that early in the product's life, the speed parameter is higher than expected. Additionally, as the Internet has grown in popularity, the speed parameter has increased. In Chapter III, I examine whether the interactions can be described through a reference hierarchy in addition to the cross-country word-of-mouth eff ects already in the literature. I also expand the word-of-mouth e ffect by relating the magnitude of the e ffect to the distance between the two countries. The current literature only applies that e ffect equally to the n closest countries (forming a neighbor set). This also leads to an analysis of how to best measure the distance between two countries. I compare four possible distance measures: distance between the population centroids, trade ow, tourism ow, and cultural similarity. Including the reference hierarchy improves the predictions by 30 percent over the current best model. Finally, in Chapter IV, I look more closely at the Bass Diffusion Model. It is prominently used in the marketing literature and is the base of my analysis in Chapter III. All of the current formulations include the implicit assumption that all the regression parameters are equal for each country. One dollar increase in GDP should have more of an eff ect in a poor country than in a rich country. A Dirichlet process prior enables me to cluster the countries by their regression coefficients. Incorporating the distance measures can improve the predictions by 35 percent in some cases.

Two important issues regarding international market entry strategy remain largely unexplored: international launch time window (the elapsed time between product launch in the home country and launch in the focal country) and country sequence. First, I investigate the factors that drive international launch time window and its impact on the performance of new products in foreign markets. The results show that launch time window is positively associated with word of mouth, but negatively related to prelaunch advertising efforts and foreign demand potential. Second, I examine the determinants of the sequence of countries in which firms introduce new products and its impact on performance in foreign countries. The findings include that a country‘s order in the international launch sequence of a new product affects the product‘s performance in that country. Country order is negatively related to country revenues. A country‘s cultural distance (economic openness) is positively (negatively) associated with its order in the sequence. I also find that there is cross-country spillover effect - lagged revenues from other countries and lagged marketing efforts in the home country are positively related to a new product‘s revenues in the focal foreign country. The more culturally sensitive a product, the earlier culturally closer countries are in the launch sequence for that product. Based on the cross-country performance spillover effects, I recommend a launch sequence that can maximize overall performance in foreign markets.

This is a case study of Taiwan¡¦s bicycle industry. With the view of international standards we tried to explore the integration of the new product development process in Taiwan¡¦s bicycle industry. We have found that Taiwan¡¦s assemblers and components suppliers are parallel connected to interact with foreign buyers simultaneously. And all the R&D services to which every member offered are finally integrated under the instructions of the foreign buyers. We describe such a cooperation mode as ¡¥Parallel Connecting New Product Development Process¡¦. We argue that this new kind of cooperation mode is better than the traditional sequential staging model that is represented as ¡¥vertical connecting¡¦ cooperation mode in innovation flexibility and speed because of the communication efficiency and convenience to the OEM buyers. In this thesis we will describe the new product development interactions among the foreign buyers, components suppliers and the assemblers. And we will also discuss the competitive advantages and the causes of such a new cooperation mode. With this kind of cooperation mode we also discuss the R&D management implications for the small and medium sized enterprises in Taiwan. We argue that this new kind of cooperation mode can bring a new management implication to the small and medium sized enterprises in Taiwan, which is different from the main argument in the literature of strategic flexibility.

Due to the fast development of IT, quick change of market demand and collaboration in business operation between companies, departments, and individuals, the concept of collaborative commerce has drawn much attention gradually. However, the tools of collaborative commerce used in the past, just like PDM and CPD, are merely used for control in a single stage; despite functions of data management and collaborative design are more capable of doing cross-function work. New PLM solutions can recover the disadvantages of past collaborative commerce tools in the new product development process, make the RD control link from spot to line, in order to control process effectively, establish operation standard, and accumulate experiences of new product design and manufacture. During the process of implementing IT, although not perfect in the beginning, enterprises will find the problems out only when users apply IT and find some problems which don¡¦t be found before implementing IT. It is just the purpose of enterprises to take advantage of implementing IT to review business processes. Technology and organization should make an adaptation in order to solve these problems and the key way to judge the IT to be successful or fail is to see whether IT and organization make a good adaptation. There are few successful cases applying PLM solution to support new product development process in Taiwan; moreover, manufacturing industry is the most representative of industries in Taiwan. For this reason, manufacturing enterprises which have implemented PLM solution and succeeded in closing the case are chosen for case studies, and based on adaptive structuration perspective to research the adaptation done by three structures of technology, organization, and task after PLM solutions are implemented into enterprises. Through this research to find that the adaptation degree is different in the interaction and appropriation between technology, organization, and task. Discrepancy events will also produced in the adaptation process. The key factors to decide whether enterprises take advantage of implementing IS to get advantage are the degree of solving discrepancy events by enterprises. In order to make enterprises get more competitive advantages through implementing PLM solution, the manager should realize more deeply that what changes are result from IT implemented in enterprises and what reason to make this change, so as to know well what advantages PLM solution make.

Abstract Under the trends of the globalization and symbol consumption, the creative industries from kownledge economy become the opportunity of Taiwan development in the future. Take a broad view of the evolution of Taiwan creative industries in recent years, although the name ' cultural industry ' based on the community build is close for 'creative industries' from Britain, these are two different development concept. Because of some misunderstands, it reduce effect of the industry popularize to cause, this becomes the proposition cared about most in this research too. The purpose of research is probes into Taiwan regional ' cultural industry ' and difference of ' creative industries '¡Bprobes into the characteristic of creative industries, and get the strategy of the new product development in the creativity industries. This research choose the craft industry, and the method is case study research , with the analysis of secondary data and the interview. The conclusion part, There are eight items in analysis including ' the industries with high risk '¡B' possess the plural skill group ', ' create the goods which accord with the market ', ' with high regular costs and low costs with making again ', ' people create for means getting scarce ', ' manage risk by means of the enterprise ', ' diversifying profit ', 'technology is key '.and the new product in development is ¡uMr. Bliss¡v.

The mobile communication market in Taiwan is blooming developing, and the number of mobilephone users is growing up. Nowadays, over 90% of having-a-mobilephone users in Taiwan, even this number are tending toward saturation at present. Therefore, the telecommunication providers expect mobile value-added service can increase the revenue by taking advantage of 3G high-speed transfer rate. But lacking of the ¡§Killer App¡¨, this service doesn¡¦t attract people to use. The ARPU (average revenue per user) doesn¡¦t improve much as we anticipated. The purposes of this study are to realize present situation of mobile value-added service¡¦s development and to develop acceptable content that can be implemented. The study collected literatures and documents to analyze progress of mobile communication system¡¦s development and present situation of mobile value-added service¡¦s development, furthermore, make the development strategy of mobile value-added service according to the new product development procedure, then test user acceptance by TAM. The study proposes ¡§User-generated Content¡¨ as the new mobile value-added service. This service has 6 characters: ¡§highly personalized¡¨, ¡§timely¡¨, ¡§ease of use¡¨, ¡§rich information¡¨, ¡§highly integrated¡¨, ¡§cross platform¡¨. The result of TAM questionnaire proves that ¡§perceived usefulness¡¨ is positive influenced by ¡§timely¡¨, ¡§mobility¡¨, ¡§personalization¡¨, ¡§perceived ease of use¡¨, and ¡§attitude toward using¡¨ is positive influenced by ¡§perceived usefulness¡¨, ¡§perceived ease of use¡¨, ¡§relatives and friends¡¦ influence¡¨, ¡§price¡¨.

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The Software Life Cycle (SLC) often comprises a complex sequence of processes, each with many subparts where various execution decisions throughout the pipeline can greatly affect the success or failure of a given project. Some of the most important decisions involve the allocation of scarce resources throughout the SLC, which are often based on estimations about future market demand and various extraneous factors of high stochasticity. Despite numerous efforts in standardization, many projects are still highly dependent on the subjective aptitude of individual managers, who may in turn rely on ad hoc techniques rather than standardized and repeatable ones. The results can be unpredictability and undue reliance on specific individuals. This paper considers imposing a mathematical framework on two of the key aspects of SLC: Deciding how to dynamically allocate available resources throughout the development pipeline, and when to stop further work on a given task in light of the associated Return On Investment (ROI) metrics. In so doing, the software development process is modeled as a problem in New Product Development (NPD) Management, which can be approached using control theory and stochastic combinatorial optimization techniques. The paper begins by summarizing some of the previous developments in these fields, and proposes some future research directions for solving complex resource allocation problems under stochastic settings. The outcome is a formal framework that when combined with competent Configuration Management techniques, can rapidly achieve near-optimal solutions at each stage of the SLC in a standardized manner. / text

This thesis examines the state of reporting Lessons Learned in a Swedish company that operates globally and explores the areas of potential improvements through better classification and reporting of Lessons Learned from previous projects. Particularly, it explores which the most effective ways to capture and document Lessons Learned are as well as how a System that supports efficient storage, sharing and retrieval of Lessons Learned can be specified. The research is a case study in a Swedish company and is a mixed-model research as it uses both quantitative and qualitative data from primary sources. Indeed, the data collection was done via interviews, questionnaires, a focus group and the study of the company’s documents. The findings revealed some issues in the Lessons Learned methods used in the company, especially in documentation. Additionally, the need for a Lessons Learned System to manage the knowledge and experience from projects was also identified. The thesis concludes with explicit answers to the research questions and more specific with the suggestion of certain guidelines for the employees, a new template for reporting Lessons Learned and the specifications of a Lessons Learned System that can support efficient storage, sharing and retrieval of Lessons Learned.