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It is widely believed that with the transition from the industrial to information-based economics, organizational knowledge has emerged as the single most critical resource at both macro and micro levels, which promotes the creation, sharing, and leveraging of the organization???s knowledge in current Customer Order Driven Engineering (CODE) environment. Insufficient knowledge management, hence lack of a structured Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) in a CODE environment, whilst involved in New Product Development (NPD) process may result in several problems resulting in creating less successful products. This research establishes an ???Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) framework??? with focus on the Product, Process and Organizational issues related to the NPD process. The framework has three major stages, namely ???Knowledge Acquisition???, ???Knowledge Organizing??? and ???Knowledge Validating???. Various frameworks/methods/models are developed as steps for each of these stages. The framework may increase the effectiveness of product and process development as well as enterprise competitiveness through developing a system architecture to understand, analyse and map organisational, operational activities and business objectives; and increasing the ability of an organisation to establish an integrated partnerships to share efforts on the design, manufacture and delivery of products. In knowledge acquisition stage, a ???Knowledge Capture framework??? and the ???Relationship matrices??? are developed to analyse and link the generic knowledge items of a NPD process in concurrent engineering environment. Among the relationship matrices, Task versus Task (Design Structure Matrix - DSM) matrix is comprehensively explored and decomposed to structure and link several processes at different levels for effective representation of the overall enterprise representation. In knowledge organizing stage, the acquired knowledge (important relations identified in the Task versus Task matrices) is represented in the form of ???Questionnaires???. Best practices gathered from several manufacturing firms in NPD in CODE have also been used as knowledge resource base for the Questionnaires. For grouping and validation of these Questionnaires, an ???Assessment Model??? is developed, which consists of five performance indicators of the organization namely ???Marketing???, ???Technical???, ???Financial???, ???Resource Management???, and ???Project Management???. Industry applications are carried out in two Australian Manufacturing Companies for the validation of the acquired knowledge. Two tests are carried out; in order to assess the sensitivity of question categories followed by another test to observe whether the model can accurately display the overall performance of the company in the five categories of NPD phases. These two tests have identified possible improvement areas in the NPD process of manufacturing organizations involved in the validation phase. Up to 80% of the findings of the EKB framework and assessment model were found to reflect the actual practices of the organizations.

Modern product design projects are often challenged by their interdisciplinary nature, increasing product complexity and time pressure. The challenge for product designers is to recall all relevant design aspects that are potentially applicable and important for the product to be designed at the right time. The negligence of certain design aspects may result in increased development costs and in inferior products. A recommended way to handle complexity in the design process is to work systematically, with checklists and guidelines offering a possibility to support product designers in this task. However, design guidelines that provide a comprehensive and generically content that support product designers holistically in their design projects are not readily available. Moreover, in-depth evaluations of the role, use, usefulness and usability of design guidelines are quite rare in the current literature. Therefore, the research study presented in this thesis sought to accomplish two tasks: the generation of a comprehensive set of generic and practically aimed product design guidelines in a paper-copy format that holistically supports product designers in their often complex design projects; and the evaluation of these generated design guidelines with the purpose of determining their role, use, usefulness and usability for product designers. A comprehensive and generically applicable set of product design guidelines in a ready-to-use paper-copy format that holistically provides in-depth information for the product design aspects that need to be considered during a design process was generated. Besides, a research study, using questionnaires and interviews, with product design students and professional product designers in New Zealand was carried out with the purpose of determining the role, use, usefulness and usability of the generated design guidelines for designers. As a consequence, valuable insights into the role of the guidelines as practitioners� design tool for professional designers and noteworthy findings about the role of the guidelines as educational tool for novice designers were obtained. The findings suggested that the use of guidelines as a tool in the design process is generally not very prevalent due to the designers� lack of knowledge about the benefits, location and accessibility of useful product design guidelines. Furthermore, it has been found that the designers used the generated guidelines sporadically and driven by their interest or demand in the design aspects applicable to their projects. In terms of the guidelines� usefulness it has been identified that the guidelines evaluated were generically applicable to different projects and provided a specific in-depth content. The guidelines have also been found to be quite useful as educational, planning, management and evaluation tool for novice and professional designers. However, in terms of the guidelines� usability, several problems were determined that made the generated guidelines too inefficient to be beneficial for the participants, especially for the professional designers. Accordingly, it has been concluded that a change of the guidelines� format into a digital interactive format, is likely to solve most of the identified problems and provide a useful and usable tool for product designers respectively.

The life cycle of the semiconductor equipment industry has evolved from a fast growth high profit ramp-up phase to one of much slower growth and intense competitiveness that has squeezed profit margins. In this environment, one of the key success factors for semiconductor equipment suppliers is product management. A correct product planning and implementation strategy will generate a healthy market performance and profitable business operations. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers and agents need to consider their product competencies to develop a planning strategy for new product introduction, which includes product positioning, target market selection as well as new product introduction guidance and evaluation procedures. This thesis focuses on industrial data analysis and a case study based on face-to-face interviews with several people at various positions within semiconductor equipment suppliers. The major approach of this study is a description of competitive strategy through a qualitative analysis of the industry, and an analysis the key factors¡Xincluding product management, product lifetime cycle and knowledge management¡Xthat influence the technology service ability of an equipment company. The conclusions of this study are presented as follows: 1. Semiconductor agency has to introduce new product to different market segments for its product life time extension or future business development as well as product competence enhancement. 2. New technology development trends become a threat to existing technology and products, which will replace current products in the market within a short period. 3. Product management needs a procedure to evaluate the new product and the service income potential in order to assess the product¡¦s profit and loss prospects. Then the management can adjust the business priorities to maximize total company revenue through periodic review. Future studies should consider the effect of changes in the industrial structure and/or the market environment and analyze the impact on market development risks and strategies. Keywords: Semiconductor Equipment Agency, Product Management, Targeting Market, Resource Based, Knowledge Management

Today’s technological development has shed new light upon the management practiceproduct management and it is considered more important than ever to manage products.Moreover, organisations to a growing extent face external bodies that evaluate them andimpose organisational structures that they need to comply with. Product management isnevertheless characterised with ambiguity, broad definitions and various depictions. Ascattered research field together with practitioners struggle to define the area stress the needto clarify product management structuring. This thesis uses a sensemaking perspective and akaleidoscopic approach in order to capture product management structuring in a fragmentedarea. It means that we investigate what the sensemaking outcome of product management isand why organisational members make sense this way. This thesis has found that productmanagement is understood on two main levels and that the practice comprises bothconsistency and inconsistency on an inter-organisational level. Findings suggest that sharedidentity, strong commitment, cues, metaphors and expectations have influenced consistentunderstandings and crystallised the sensemaking outcome. In addition, product governanceinfluences product management and therefore the sensemaking outcome are inconsistent inseveral structuring elements. The thesis concludes that our contemporary productmanagement practice is comprised with general components that can be structured similarlybut also components that require a customised structuring due to the product governance trait.

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This research examines how companies adapt to more unpredictable environments by developing dynamic capabilities that help sustain innovation and change. The key explanatory construct is modular architecture - the intentional decomposition of systems (products or processes) into relatively independent sub-units with standard interfaces. The dissertation is structured as three semi-independent papers plus an introduction and a literature review. The literature review describes current theories of modular systems and discusses the similarities and differences to related concepts such as nearly decomposable systems, loose coupling, and vertical decomposition. The literature review identifies three gaps in the current literature. First, there has been a limited degree of theorising on the concept outside the field of technology management. Second, the current literature is based largely on anecdotal case studies and there is little quantitative evidence of the strategic value of modularity. Finally, there is a lack of understanding concerning the implementation of modular architectures. The first paper generalises from product to organisation design and derives five principles for modular organisational architectures. A hypothetical example is developed to illustrate how a large home appliances company might apply these principles to create a process platform consisting of reconfigurable building blocks. The chapter also proposes some extensions of current theory to more realistically adopt modularity concepts in organisation design. The second paper is based on a study that explores the current product and process architectures at three leading manufacturers of vacuum cleaners. It identifies some of the key barriers to increased flexibility among companies in mature industries. It also considers the relative value of modularity for established companies pursuing incremental innovation versus entrepreneurial companies introducing more radical innovations. The third paper presents the results from a survey questionnaire study of companies in the home appliances industry in the UK. and US. The relationship between market context, product and process architecture, strategic flexibility and firm performance is examined by means of structural equations modelling. The results show a positive relationship between modular product architectures and performance, with product model variety as a mediating variable. The thesis makes the following contributions to the existing literature: It complements extant theorising by generalising modular principles to organisation design. It contributes to methodology by developing a questionnaire for assessing modularity in product and process design. Finally, it provides one of the first empirical studies of the effects of modularity on strategic flexibility and firm performance.