Social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and online communities plays an important role for knowledge production and diffusion as well as discussions among people. Among social media, online brand communities (OBCs) have recently received attention from both academics and practitioners due to the practical benefits of OBCs for consumers and companies. For consumers, knowledge sharing and its collective activities help them to make purchase decisions and to protect themselves against firms’ monopoly and oligopoly or collusion and anticompetitive actions. For companies, new ideas and feedback on brand products created by OBC members are useful input to develop new products and enhance existing product lines. Therefore, active content generation by community members is one of the critical success factors of OBCs. However, many scholars argue that only a few members who are more devoted to a community are tending to engage in OBC activities and many community members tend to remain in the periphery (sometimes called ‘lurkers') of the community by using OBCs merely for gathering information without any contributions. Therefore, it is important to make members in the periphery of the community transit to the core to increase members’ intentions and ‘devoted members’ to produce more valuable benefits for both consumers and firms. In spite of its importance, the literature is lacking in efforts to explain how and when community members in the periphery transit to the core of the community in a long-term perspective. This study aims to reveal how and why OBC members transit from the periphery to the core of the community and how to increase their intention to use OBC from a long-term perspective. OBC use behaviour is classified into, largely, two categories according to the purposes of an OBC: behaviour with a brand product consumption purpose; and behaviour with a social relationship building purpose. This study classifies OBC members as three clusters by social identity theory: tourists, minglers, and devoted members (devotees and insiders). The devoted members have valuable consumption knowledge of brand and strong social bonds in the OBC and the OBC members become a devoted member by accumulated brand knowledge and experiences through long-term OBC use. Therefore, from a socialisation aspect, this study adopts organisational socialisation theory as the theoretical lens to explain how and why the members evolve from novice members as tourist to devoted members in OBC contexts. Socialisation theories argue that there are usually three sequential stages for a member to gain full membership in a community: pre-entry, accommodation, and affiliation. In addition, this study adopts IS implementation theory to understand OBC user behaviours from an IS use behaviour perspective: acceptance in the pre-entry stage and routinisation in the accommodation stage and infusion in the affiliation stage. By reviewing socialisation theory and IS implementation theory, this study finds four significant motivations, those of information quality, trust, sense of belonging, and brand loyalty for intention of OBC use from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. To integrate the socialisation perspective with the IS use perspective, this study adopts a technology acceptance model (TAM) as a theoretical framework to link to motivators in different OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stages. As a result, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain the OBC members’ transition process from acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation). The aim of this study is to predict and explain the transition of motivators for OBC use from pre-entry to affiliation and how to improve members’ intention of OBC use from a long-term perspective ultimately to foster ‘devoted members’. This study adopts an online survey targeting 518 participants who belong to 17 OBCs in South Korea and the conceptual framework is validated. The results show that all factors (i.e. information quality, trust, sense of belonging, brand loyalty) are significant determinants to increase intention to use OBCs and the factors have a causal relationship with each other to form a transition process from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. This study also reveals that brand loyalty has a significant role to explain the transition process and directly influence user intention to use OBCs. The sense of belonging also directly affects members’ intention to use OBCs but has less impact than brand loyalty. In addition, the results indicate that TAM is an appropriate model to predict user behaviours in a long-term perspective to explain the change of OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stage and confirms that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have significant impact on the intention to use OBCs as in other IS studies. Understanding the transition process within OBCs has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it will extend our understanding of how IS end users transit from acceptance behaviour to continued use and extended use of information systems in virtual community contexts. For managers, this study will provide them with insight on how to retain potential consumers in OBCs and facilitate their activities to gain consumer feedback on existing and new products.

New product ideation is the transformation of a raw idea into a robust concept with consideration of fit and feasibility of technologies, customer benefits, and market opportunity. Although the ideation process often involves ambiguous processes, it is the most critical activity in new product development (NPD). As a creativity task, the ideation process is considered heuristic rather than algorithmic. However, managing the ideation process as either a completely heuristic or an entirely algorithmic procedure leads to just conventional outcomes. Rooted in cognitive psychology, this study proposes that ideation activities in NPD should be pursued as Simonton's "constrained stochastic behavior." An ideation task not only needs good componential factors but also requires constraint to frame the task by precluding unwieldy ideas while promoting high variability of ideas. Focusing on the inputs and attempting to strike a balance between algorithmic and heuristic ideation process may provide the mechanisms to manage the psychological perceptions with an aim to stimulate and orchestrate the ideation staff's cognitive efforts to generate the creative idea. To achieve this goal, new product idea creativity is considered as the ideas that could turn out to be products that are novel to and useful for customers, and appropriate to firms' existing production systems. In addition, the study asserts that componential factors include two factors: specialization representing idea creators' depth of NPD knowledge, experience, and skills in a product domain, and diverse expertise representing the breadth of ideation team's knowledge, experience, and skills concerning the same domain of NPD. These factors are essential and collectively can enhance creativity in the development of new product ideas. Finally, goal constraint is defined, operationalized, and incorporated in the NPD ideation framework. This constraint encapsulates the overall criteria and stylistic principle for a particular product domain and reflects the frame of reference for new product idea development. The findings provide mixed results, and yield at least three new concepts. First, the process of new product idea development truly requires specialization and diverse expertise if its ultimate goal is creativity. Both componential factors are essential and together can enhance new product ideas on all important dimensions. Second, goal constraint exhibits a linear relationship, rather than an inverted U-curve relationship, with idea newness and usefulness-two dimension of creativity important for customers. Finally, goal constraint can enhance creative outcomes of new product ideas, especially in the ideation team exhibiting a low level of specialization.

The purpose of this research is to investigate current company business process from sales forecasting perspective and provide potential improvements of how to deal with unstable market demand and increase overall precision of forecasting. The problem which company face is an unstable market demand and not enough precision in sales forecasting process. Therefore the research questions are:  How current forecasting process can be improved?  What methods, can be implemented in order to increase the precision of forecasting? Study can be described as an action research using an abductive approach supported by combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis practices. In order to achieve high degree of reliability the study was based on verified scientific literature and data collected from the case company while collaborating with company’s COO. Research exposed the current forecasting process of the case company. Different forecasting methods were chosen according to the existing circumstances and analyzed in order to figure out which could be implemented in order to increase forecasting precision and forecasting as a whole. Simple exponential smoothing showed the most promising accuracy results, which were measured by applying MAD, MSE and MAPE measurement techniques. Moreover, trend line analysis was applied as well, as a supplementary method. For the reason that the case company presents new products to the market limited amount of historical data was available. Therefore simple exponential smoothing technique did not show accurate results as desired. However, suggested methods can be applied for testing and learning purposes, supported by currently applied qualitative methods.

Many potential benefits of new product introductions (NPI) have been identified in existing literature, yet there are empirical and theoretical evidence that suggests that such benefits are not assured. Building on the concepts of time compression diseconomies, absorptive capacity, and time diversification, we argue that benefits that a firm derives from introducing new products depend on the process of NPI, which we conceptualize as how and what products are introduced by the firm. We propose that pace, rhythm, and the scope are three important characteristics of the process of NPI that affect firm value. Further, we argue that this effect is moderated by organizational marketing and technological intensities. We use an unbalanced panel dataset of the products introduced by public firms between 1991 and 2015 to investigate the proposed framework in the bio-pharmaceutical industry. We estimate the proposed model using a multilevel modeling framework, accounting for endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and heteroscedasticity. The proposed framework and modeling approach provide empirical support for the role of pace, rhythm and scope of NPI on firm performance, and guide managers on choosing the right growth strategy to improve new product performance.

Background: The reason for conducting this master thesis within the field of knowledge management derived from the realization that there was a need for an increased understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of the integration and transfer of knowledge in cross-functional new product development projects. Research advocates that organizations with organic project-based environments with fluid team boundaries may aggravate routine-based work and organizational memory, which in turn may lead to an organizations’ inability of capturing and storing existing personalized knowledge for internal storage and future transfer (Koskinen, 2004). For this reason, the conversion of knowledge for re-use between and within projects in an organization is not supported in a natural way (Lindner and Wald, 2011). To this end, organizational culture is critically important in facilitating a knowledge transfer culture within an organization that supports such knowledge conversion processes (Davenport and Prusak, 1998a). Thus, an increased understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of knowledge integration and transfer in cross-functional projects is viewed as an opportunity to contribute with findings with interest in both industry and academia. Increasing the understanding of organizational culture’s role in knowledge conversion facilitation is particularly seen as an important research area in existing knowledge management research. The study aimed to produce a deeper understanding of these social processes by exploring and interpreting them in their real-life social contexts. Research question: How does organizational culture and knowledge management strategies support as well as hinder knowledge integration and transfer between cross-functional product development teams and specialists in a project-based organization? Purpose: To increase the understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of knowledge integration and transfer in cross-functional projects. In order to study the socio-cultural elements, a case study in a global Swedish company engaged in new product development was conducted during the spring of 2016. Method: The research design of the study was case study. The empirical data was collected through face-to-face interviews, observations and studying of internal steering documentations. The author found it necessary to adopt an interpretivist epistemological position with a qualitative focus in alignment with employing abductive reasoning in order to understand the collected data and to explore the posed research question. Quality measures with respect to qualitative research studies were cautiously considered. Conclusion: This study found that an organization with a network-based knowledge culture and a standardized process with standards and routines for effective knowledge conversion processes are two sides of the same coin that can support the knowledge integration and transfer between cross-functional product development teams and specialists in a project-based organization. Further, both a single dominant organizational culture and multiple local cultures within an organization can both support and hinder the integration and transfer of knowledge. In extension to this finding, inconsistencies in the knowledge integration and transfer processes may evolve across these different cultural interpretations which may further support or hinder the social dynamics in an organization. Moreover, my study suggests that a network-based knowledge culture can interact with a standardized process in order to enable effective knowledge integration and transfer routines.

A realização de diagnóstico de processo auxilia a compreensão dos fatores internos e externos que influenciam o Processo de Desenvolvimento de Produtos (PDP) e de suas características, como capacidade técnica da equipe, forma como as atividades são organizadas, recursos disponíveis, exigências dos clientes ou poder de barganha com os fornecedores. No entanto nas últimas décadas não foi vista uma atenção especial aos métodos e ferramentas de diagnósticos voltados ao PDP. Analisando diagnósticos reais do PDP de empresas que utilizaram o método da árvore da realidade atual foi levantada a possibilidade de existir um conjunto significativo de problemas comum a todos os diagnósticos do PDP que poderiam servir de referência para diagnósticos futuros. O objetivo, portanto, desse trabalho é propor um método de diagnóstico que utiliza problemas recorrentes para aumentar a eficiência e eficácia do diagnóstico do PDP e apoiar a identificação de oportunidades de melhoria. O método proposto, denominado de Diagile, aprimorou o método de construção de árvore da realidade atual e é composto de melhores práticas de gestão de projetos e identificação e priorização de oportunidades de melhoria. Para apoiar a execução do método foi desenvolvida uma ferramenta de automação de diagnóstico (FAD) e uma planilha eletrônica para priorizar projetos de melhoria. As principais entregas da aplicação do Diagile são uma árvore da realidade atual e um portfólio de projetos de melhoria customizado por empresa. Para avaliar o método proposto foram executados um experimento controlado e dois estudos de casos. De acordo com os resultados do experimento, primeiramente, foi confirmado que a utilização do Diagile aumentou a eficiência da realização de diagnóstico comparado com a realização de um diagnóstico aplicando o método tradicional da árvore da realidade atual. Após as realizações dos estudos de caso, que serviram para avaliar o método, foi visto que as empresas ficaram satisfeitas com os resultados obtidos com o diagnóstico, relatando a boa qualidade das árvores e a pertinência dos projetos de melhoria sugeridos. Conclui-se que o objetivo desse trabalho foi atingido, demonstrando o aumento da eficiência e eficácia do diagnóstico utilizando o método proposto. / The execution of process diagnostic assists the comprehension of internal and external factors that influence the product developing process (NPD) and its characteristics such as team technical capacity, way that the activity are organized, available resources, client requirements or suppliers negotiation power. In the last decades, any special attention it was given to the diagnostic methods and tools focused to NPD process. The analysis of real NPD diagnosis cases from enterprises that used the reality tree method suggested the possibility that it may found a significant group of problems that are common to all NPD diagnostic that can be used as reference for future diagnosis. The objective of this work is to propose a diagnostic method based on the use of recurrent problems to increase the efficiency and efficacy of the NPD diagnosis and assist the identification of improvements opportunities. The proposed method, called Diagile, is based on the construction of the current reality tree and is composed of project management best practices prioritizing improvements opportunities. To support the application of the proposed method a computational diagnostic tool and an electronic spread sheet has been developed to prioritize project improvements. The main deliverables of the application of Diagile are a current reality tree and a customized portfolio of improvements project of the company. To evaluate the proposed method a controlled experiment and two cases studies was performed. According to the experiment results, it was first possible to confirm that the use of Diagile increased the efficiency of the diagnostic execution when compared with the performance of the diagnosis using the traditional current reality tree method. After the execution of the two case studies, that was used to evaluate the proposed method, if has been confirmed that the companies where satisfied with the obtained diagnostic results, reporting the good quality of the tree and the importance of the suggested improvement projects. With this it has been concluded that the objective of this work was complete, and that the proposed method and tools increase the efficiency and efficacy of the NPD diagnosis.

A experimentação e testes com o uso de protótipos físicos ou simulação em computadores é uma prática utilizada para o desenvolvimento de diversos produtos industriais. As indústrias aeronáutica, automobilística, mecânica, naval, petrolífera e microeletrônica, entre outras, há muito empregam uma ou ambas as técnicas citadas. No entanto, inexistem referências ou estudos sobre a aplicação prática e conceitual desse assunto dentro do ambiente bancário mundial. O propósito desta pesquisa é descrever e interpretar os modos de experimentação empregados atualmente para a formação de fundos de investimento no mercado financeiro brasileiro e propor novos procedimentos para o seu desenvolvimento em analogia ao processo industrial. A metodologia proposta foi demonstrada com a utilização de dados reais levantados durante quatro anos no mercado financeiro para o desenvolvimento de um fundo aberto referenciado DI fictício simulados com o auxílio de técnicas de Dinâmica de Sistemas e de Inteligência Artificial. Os resultados reforçam as possibilidades de analogia entre o desenvolvimento de produtos industriais tangíveis e serviços intangíveis, quebrando paradigmas e propondo novos conceitos sob uma ótica renovadora para o desenvolvimento de produtos financeiros. O problema de otimização apresentado representa um novo campo de aplicação para o uso integrado de Dinâmica de Sistemas com algoritmos inteligentes, sendo que os algoritmos genéticos provaram ser uma ferramenta de suporte à decisão adequada para um ambiente competitivo e globalizado. / Experimentation and tests using physical prototypes or computer simulation are practices used in the development of various industrial products. The aeronautical, automobile, mechanical, naval, petroleum and micro-electronics industries have been using one or both of the mentioned techniques for a very long time. However, this issue has not been studied in detail in the banking area. The aim of this research is to describe and interpret the experimentation modes currently used in the Brazilian financial market in order to propose new procedures to develop investment funds akin to the industrial process. The proposed methodology was tested using 4 years of real data of the Brazilian financial market in order to develop a fictional investment fund based on Dynamic Systems and Artificial Intelligence (genetic algorithms) simulation principles. The results strengthen the possible analogy between the development of tangible industrial products and intangible services and propose new concepts according to an innovative development methodology for financial products. The related optimization problem represents a new field of application for Dynamic Systems combined with intelligent algorithms and, particularly, the Genetic Algorithms (GA) based model provided an efficient decision-making tool to be used in a competitive and globalized environment.

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One of the major demand related risks for companies that produce consumer electronics goods is change in consumer preferences over time as reflected in the weights they attach to the attributes of products. This contributes to the difficulty of predicting whether consumers will purchase a new product or not and the accuracy of such forecasts can have significant ramifications for companies’ strategies, profitability and even their chances of survival. Knowledge of attribute-weights and accurate forecasts of new products can give companies better insights during the product development stages, inform go-no-go decisions on whether to launch a developed product and also support decisions on whether a recently launched product should be withdrawn or not due to poor early stage sales. Despite the important implications of change in attribute-weights, no research has investigated the extent to which such changes occur and impact on the accuracy of forecasts of the future market share of these products. Prior to the current research, it was assumed that the weights are constant over time – even when the nature of the attributes was assumed to change. To investigate these concerns choice based conjoint (CBC) was applied to data gathered in a longitudinal survey of consumer choices relating a range of consumer electronic products, where innovation has different rates and the product life cycles are various. This allowed an assessment of the extent to which the weights of attributes of choice-based conjoint models change over a six months period for consumer durable products and the degree to which this variability is dependent on the nature of the product. It demonstrates that the change in weights is greater for products that have high technological complexity and shorter lifecycles and also links the changeability of weights to the characteristics of potential consumers. The results of thesis demonstrate that the assumption of constant weights can potentially lead to inaccurate market share forecast for high-tech, short life-cycle products that are launched several months after the choice-based modelling has been conducted.

O processo de desenvolvimento de novos produtos (DNP) se torna cada vez mais uma questão de colaboração entre a equipe interna de desenvolvimento da empresa central e os fornecedores externos co-localizados ou distantes geograficamente. Cada vez mais, empresas tendem a terceirizar parte ou todo o desenvolvimento de produtos, devido ao fato de que o fornecedor é uma fonte de novas tecnologias e conhecimentos, além de ajudar a reduzir custos e riscos do projeto. Neste sentido, as tecnologias de informação e comunicações (TIC) constituem ferramentas de suporte para gerenciar as diferentes formas de colaboração com os fornecedores (colaborações do tipo white, grey e black box). Na literatura, as TIC têm sido reconhecidas como um fator importante para o sucesso do processo de DNP, mas são poucos os estudos focados em estudar a relação entre o uso das TIC e a colaboração com fornecedores. Além disso, a grande maioria destas pesquisas são pouco aprofundadas, apresentando poucas ferramentas e com aplicações limitadas no DNP. Assim o objetivo desde trabalho é analisar como podem ser usadas as TIC no DNP colaborativo dependendo dos três tipos de projetos de colaboração: white, grey e black box. O trabalho tem uma abordagem de métodos mistos, cominando etapas qualitativas e quantitativas. Em termos qualitativos, são explorados aspectos da literatura e estudos de casos em uma empresa multinacional. Enquanto em termos quantitativos, o trabalho apresenta uma pesquisa survey com 105 empresas que operam no Brasil. Como principais resultados obtiveram-se: (i) a identificação das TIC usadas no processo de desenvolvimento de produtos em um contexto inter-empresarial, (ii) a verificação do impacto do uso das TIC na performance do processo de desenvolvimento de produtos quando são aplicadas práticas colaborativas (iii) a proposição e verificação de um framework para o uso das TIC nos diferentes tipos de projetos colaborativos. Do ponto de vista acadêmico, esta dissertação permite compreender melhor o impacto e o uso das TIC para cada um dos tipos de projetos colaborativos. Do ponto de vista prático, este estudo apresenta uma solução para empresas que buscam competitividade e uma abertura no processo de DNP, através do uso das TIC como suporte para o mesmo. / The new product development (NPD) process increasingly becomes a matter of collaboration between the company’s internal product development team and its external suppliers, which can be co-located or geographically dispersed. Increasingly, companies tend to partially or fully outsource their development process, since suppliers are a source of new technologies and knowledge, and they can also help to reduce costs and risks of the development. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) comprise tools that can support the management of three different collaborative product development projects with suppliers: white, grey and black box. In the literature, ICT are acknowledged to be an important factor for the success of the NPD process. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on studying the relationship between the use of ICT and the collaboration with suppliers, and the majority of studies have not treated the issue in depth, presenting only a few tools with limited application to the NPD. Thus, the objective of this research is to analyze how ICTs can be used in the collaborative NPD context depending on the three types of collaborative projects. This research uses a mix methods approach by combining qualitative and quantitative methodological stages. Qualitatively, the literature aspects and the cases studies of a multinational company is explored. Quantitatively, this research presents a survey with 105 companies that operate in Brazil. As the main results, we present: (i) the identification of the ICT used in the product development process in an inter-organizational context, (ii) the verification of the impact of ICT use in the product development process performance when collaborative practices are applied, (iii) the proposition and the verification of a framework for the use of ICT in the different types of collaborative projects. From the academic point of view, this research enables a better understanding of the impact and the use of ICT for each type of collaborative project with suppliers. From the managerial point of view, this study presents solutions for companies that seek competitiveness and openness of the NPD process through the use of ICT.