NEW PRODUCTION CONCEPTS

Flexibilty within a framework of internal labour markets is now widely seen to be an important factor in the ability of manufacturing firms to respond quickly to changes in market conditions — which is increasingly coming to be the form that competitive advantage takes in advanced industrial economies. An emerging and flourishing literature has identified a number of ‘new production concepts’ being developed in manufacturing industries, that depart from time-honoured Taylorist systems of job fragmentation and skill minimisation. The new concepts, such as ‘flexible specialisation’, ‘human-centred production’, and ‘diversified quality production’, are all in one way or another seeking to characterise a form of ‘functional flexibility’, that both enhances productivity and offers workers themselves a greater sense of involvement with their activity. The new concepts rest on the identification of a critical linkage between work organisation, skill formation and advanced manufacturing technology; they point to a convergence between the previously separate worlds of work and of learning.

In this paper the new production concepts are characterised as elements of an emergent ‘post Fordist’ technoeconomic paradigm. The present period of uncertainty can be construed as a transition between the Fordist paradigm centred on mass production, and its successors. There is nothing predetermined about the shape of these successors: this will be the outcome of a prolonged economic, industrial and political process as much as of a technical process. The choices are identified as falling between a continuation and intensification of Fordism, dubbed Computer-Aided Taylorisation; or a break with Fordism, dubbed Skill-Dependent Innovation. The new production concepts are characterised as instances of the latter approach to manufacturing management and technology. It is through this notion of ‘competing paradigms’ that this paper formulates an approach to the ‘politics’ of technological change.     

基于客户质量需求的供应链协调研究

针对不同类型客户需求,研究了由一个供应商和一个制造商组成的二级供应链围绕单一产品的客户需求,在产品质量、价格、提前期相互竞争下的供应商与制造商Stackelberg非合作协调博弈问题。结果表明:当供应商处于领导地位时,制造商依据产品质量、价格、提前期的相互关系,可将客户需求分为质量敏感型和质量不敏感型两大类,并分别选择了供应链双方协调下的制造商最优产品质量水平、销售价格、订货提前期及利润;供应商则在制造商选择的基础上,通过BOM表,进一步确定了其提供单位产品所需某种原材料及全部原料的经济批量及批发单价并最终确定其原材料批发总价、总成本及总利润。     

领先用户在线参与新产品开发的动机研究

新产品开发与改进需要客户的参与,而领先用户是最适宜的客户.在文献研究的基础上,综合以往对客户参与的动机研究,提出了领先用户参与新产品开发的9个动机的假设.然后结合这些研究开发了量表对国内某智能手机厂商的产品开发论坛中的领先用户进行问卷调查.用因子分析方法对问卷进行分析.研究表明影响最大的是独特性产品需求和认知动机两个动机,其次,是利益动机与产品生产控制动机.而交往动机与网络沉浸动机则不明显.     

外部创新搜寻战略与新创集群企业产品创新

从过于强调区域内外大公司的作用转向重视新创企业的力量,是促进产业集群升级的新思路和新途径。通过将创业和创新搜寻理论引入产业集群研究,本文实证检验了外部创新搜寻战略对新创集群企业产品创新绩效的影响。研究发现,新创集群企业在创新活动中采取本地搜寻宽度、本地搜寻深度、全球搜寻宽度和全球搜寻深度四种不同的外部创新搜寻战略,不同的搜寻战略对新创集群企业的产品创新绩效产生了不同影响,全球搜寻宽度战略具有促进作用,本地搜寻深度战略呈现倒U型的复杂影响,本地搜寻宽度战略和全球搜寻深度战略则都没有影响。论文最后简要讨论和总结了相关的理论贡献和实践启示。     

Exploiting user experience from online customer reviews for product design

Understanding user experience (UX) becomes more important in a market-driven design paradigm because it helps designers uncover significant factors, such as user’s preference, usage context, product features, as well as their interrelations. Conventional means, such as questionnaire, survey and self-report with predefined questions and prompts, are used to collect information about users’ experience during various UX studies. However, such data is often limited and restricted by initial setups, and they won’t easily allow designers to identify all critical elements such as user profile, context, related product features, etc. Meanwhile, with widely accessible social media, the volume and velocity of customer-generated data are fast-increasing. While it is generally acknowledged that such data contains important elements in understanding and analyzing UX, extracting them to assist product design remains a challenging issue. In this study, how UX data underlying product design can be isolated and restored from customer online reviews is examined. A faceted conceptual model is proposed to elucidate the crucial factors of UX, which serves as an operational mechanism connecting to product design. A methodology of establishing a UX knowledge base from customer online reviews is then proposed to support UX-centered design activities, which consists of three stages, i.e., UX discovery to extract UX data from a single review, UX data integration to group similar data and UX network formalization to build up the causal dependencies among UX groups. Using a case study on smart mobile phone reviews, examples of UX data discovered are demonstrated and both customers and designers concerned key product features and usage situations are exemplified. This study explores the feasibility to discover valuable UX data as well as their relations automatically for product design and business strategic plan by analyzing a large volume of customer online data.     

Examining branding co-creation in brand communities on social media: Applying the paradigm of Stimulus-Organism-Response

This paper examines the antecedents of branding co-creation that include social networking sites’(SNSs) participation motivations,customer participation, brand trust and brand loyalty in social media brand communities by applying the “Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm”. The survey method was used to gather data from 407 social media users. Data were analysed using structural equation modeling techniques. The findings reveal that SNSs’ participation motivations positively influence customer participation, which in turn significantly affects brand trust and brand loyalty. Consequently, both brand trust and brand loyalty positively influence branding co-creation in brand communities on social media. Furthermore, brand trust contributes as a mediator between customer participation and brand loyalty on social media brand communities. Although studies on relationships examined through the lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm are popular, to the authors’ surprise there is scant literature examining the relationships between SNSs’ participation motivations, customer participation in social media brand communities, brand trust, brand loyalty and branding co-creation.     

面向用户需求分析的产品评论用例提取研究

[目的/意义]实现海量产品评论数据的快速分析,帮助产品设计人员高效地获取用户需求,在新产品设计的决策中提供参考。[方法/过程]在特征提取和情感分析的基础上,构造了包括"词+词性+词干+位置+依存关系"等节点特征的条件随机场模型,按照"产品特征、谁、在何种情境下、遇到了什么问题"4个要素,以描述手机屏幕和电池的负面评论为例,从产品评论中提取用例。[结果/结论]模型评估和实证研究表明,所构造的模型可以有效地从评论文本中识别产品特征、使用主体、使用情景和遇到的问题,从而快速构造用例,获取用户需求。     

基于ZIP模型和Logistic模型估计的顾客满意度、口碑推荐和新顾客购买决策关系研究

本文通过问卷调查数据,检验了顾客满意度对口碑推荐进而对新客户购买决策的影响,模型中同时考虑了产品涉入度和情感承诺的调节作用以及顾客交流特征(口碑传播者的专业性、关系强度、感知风险)对新客户购买决策的影响。结果表明:顾客满意度对口碑推荐有显著的正向影响;口碑推荐对新客户购买决策有显著的正向影响;产品涉入度在顾客满意度和口碑推荐的关系中起着显著的正向调节作用,但情感承诺的调节作用不明显;口碑传播者的专业性以及关系强度对新客户购买决策有显著的正向影响,感知风险的影响不显著。同时本文通过计算口碑推荐数量和口碑转换概率从而预测出基于口碑推荐方式获取新顾客数量。     

不确定需求及WTP差异下的再制造回收模式选择

在新产品及再制造产品的需求均为不确定的情形下,考虑了两种产品之间消费者支付意愿的差异性,分别建立了制造商回收、零售商回收及第三方回收三种不同回收模式下的再制造闭环供应链模型,并给出求解的优化条件,然后利用数值仿真对三种回收模型进行了求解和比较分析。结果表明,制造商主导的再制造闭环供应链中,第三方回收模式下制造商利润最高,制造商回收模式下新产品及再制造产品的零售价均最低,制造商利润、零售商利润及渠道总利润随再制造产品的消费者支付意愿的增加先减少后增加。     

Customer participation and new product performance: Towards the understanding of the mechanisms and key contingencies

In a study of 243 firms of varying sizes across 14 different industries, we investigate the effect of customer participation on new product development performance. We confirm that overall customer participation is positively related to new product development performance and that the effect is mediated by innovativeness. We also demonstrate that these effects are contingent upon absorptive capacity of the firm in question such that firms with high absorptive capacity stand to gain more from engaging their customers in new product development than firms with low absorptive capacity, especially at the later stages of the NPD process. The results are robust to alternative estimation techniques, measures employed to operationalize key concepts, and the industrial makeup of the sample. Post hoc analyses provide non-trivial managerial implications for the decision makers at the firm level.     

An analysis of the role of users in the total r&d portfolios of scientific instrument firms

This paper describes a real-time investigation of the total new product portfolios of nine product departments in the scientific instrument industry. It was found that within these portfolios only a few new products represented a major advance in functional performance. Most new products offered only incremental performance improvement, and many ‘new’ products were direct copies of competitors ' offerings.The scientific instrument innovation process is described in seven stages: recognition of need, invention of solution, prototype development, use in application, precommercial information dissemination, product engineering, and commercialization. In those cases where users were involved in the majority of the first five stages of the innovation process, the innovation was either a major functional improvement or a minor improvement that had not been initiated as a direct response to a competitor's product introduction. Direct copies and minor improvements that were competitive responses are notable for the absence of user involvement in the innovation process.Finally, the decision of a manufacturer to commercialize an innovation was unrelated to the level of user activity in the prior stages of the innovation process.     

Exploring market orientation through social network analysis: an exploration of three cross-functional,cross-geographic teams

Prior research has shown a correlation between market orientation and business performance as measured through new product success. Market orientation has traditionally been measured through the MKTOR and MARKOR scales developed by Narver and Slater and Kohli et al., respectively. We examine whether there might be a different, complementary way to study market orientation. Kohli and Jaworski discuss the role of networks in achieving higher levels of market orientation, but network analysis has not previously been used to study market orientation. Following Kohli and Jaworski we find that network analysis can show how information is gathered and disseminated within a group; and following Narver and Slater we find that network analysis can be used to examine customer orientation and coordination. We discover a possible association between the organization’s structure and its level of coordination, and that certain roles within the group facilitate increased customer orientation within the team. Our research suggests that network analysis, particularly when managers participate in the interpretation of results, can be an effective means of identifying and correcting obstacles to a team’s market orientation. We believe our research contributes to theory by showing an alternative, complementary way to study market orientation and suggests factors that contribute to a group’s level of market orientation. We believe that this research contributes to practice by providing managers with a practical measure to improve their organization’s market orientation, thus increasing the likelihood of new product success.     

关系作为中小企业创新资源的来源——客户共创的中介效应

传统的新产品开发范式逐渐被客户共创范式所替代,但现有文献缺少对客户共创影响产品创新底层逻辑的探讨。为此,本文假设关系才是中小企业创新资源的真正来源,构建一个有调节的中介效应模型,研究关系的不同维度——感情、人情和信任——对中小企业新产品创新的影响及其客户共创的中介效应,并利用来自长三角和珠三角275家制造型中小企业的样本数据检验假设。研究结果表明,关系的三个维度不仅会直接促进中小企业的新产品绩效,还会通过客户共创的中介作用产生间接影响;调节客户共创与新产品绩效间的关系会受到动态环境的调节,当环境动态性较高时,客户共创对新产品绩效的作用会有所增强。通过对关系影响创新的作用机理更加细粒度的研究,并挖掘了客户共创的中介作用,研究结果有助于解释关系资源对中小企业创新的重要性,并拓展了客户共创理论的研究范畴,也可为中小企业产品创新提供实践指导。     

顾客创新性和顾客产品知识对顾客个人创新行为的影响

通过对484名商业银行顾客的问卷调查,研究了顾客创新性、顾客产品知识对顾客个人创新行为的影响.本文提出了顾客个人创新行为的概念并对之进行了界定和测量,顾客个人创新行为由“创新构想的产生”和“创新构想的研究”、“创新构想的拥护与应用”3个阶段构成.实证结果表明,顾客产品知识对顾客个人创新行为具有正向直接的影响,其中顾客产品知识对创新构想的产生、创新构想的执行和拥护具有直接的正向影响;顾客创新性对顾客产品知识具有正向直接的影响;顾客创新性对顾客个人创新行为具有正向直接的影响,其中顾客创新性对创新构想的产生和研究具有直接的正向影响     

On enhancing the robustness of timeline summarization test collections

Timeline generation systems are a class of algorithms that produce a sequence of time-ordered sentences or text snippets extracted in real-time from high-volume streams of digital documents (e.g. news articles), focusing on retaining relevant and informative content for a particular information need (e.g. topic or event). These systems have a range of uses, such as producing concise overviews of events for end-users (human or artificial agents). To advance the field of automatic timeline generation, robust and reproducible evaluation methodologies are needed. To this end, several evaluation metrics and labeling methodologies have recently been developed - focusing on information nugget or cluster-based ground truth representations, respectively. These methodologies rely on human assessors manually mapping timeline items (e.g. sentences) to an explicit representation of what information a ‘good’ summary should contain. However, while these evaluation methodologies produce reusable ground truth labels, prior works have reported cases where such evaluations fail to accurately estimate the performance of new timeline generation systems due to label incompleteness. In this paper, we first quantify the extent to which the timeline summarization test collections fail to generalize to new summarization systems, then we propose, evaluate and analyze new automatic solutions to this issue. In particular, using a depooling methodology over 19 systems and across three high-volume datasets, we quantify the degree of system ranking error caused by excluding those systems when labeling. We show that when considering lower-effectiveness systems, the test collections are robust (the likelihood of systems being miss-ranked is low). However, we show that the risk of systems being mis-ranked increases as the effectiveness of systems held-out from the pool increases. To reduce the risk of mis-ranking systems, we also propose a range of different automatic ground truth label expansion techniques. Our results show that the proposed expansion techniques can be effective at increasing the robustness of the TREC-TS test collections, as they are able to generate large numbers missing matches with high accuracy, markedly reducing the number of mis-rankings by up to 50%.     

The dominant role of users in the scientific instrument innovation process

A sample of one hundred and eleven scientific instrument innovations was studied to determine the roles of instrument users and instrument manufacturers in the innovation processes which culminated in the successful commercialization of those instruments. Our key finding was that approximately 80% of the innovations judged by users to offer them a significant increment in functional utility were in fact invented, prototyped and first field-tested by users of the instrument rather than by an instrument manufacturer. The role of the first commercial manufacturer of the innovative instrument in all such cases was restricted, we found, to the performance of product engineering work on the user prototype (work which improved the prototype's reliability, ‘manufacturability’, and convenience of operation, while leaving its principles of operation intact) and to the manufacture and sale of the resulting innovative product. Thus, this research provides the interesting picture of an industry widely regarded as innovative in which the firms comprising the industry are not in themselves necessarily innovative, but rather — in 80% of the innovations sampled — only provide the product engineering and manufacturing function for innovative instrument users.We term the innovation pattern observed in scientific instruments a ‘user dominated’ one and suggest that such a pattern may play a major role in numerous industries.     

The long and winding road: Routine creation and replication in multi-site organizations

Prior research on organizational routines in the ‘capabilities’ literature has either studied how new routines are created during an exploratory process of variation and selection or how existing routines are replicated during a phase of exploitation. Few studies have analyzed the life cycle of new routine creation and replication as an integrated process. In an in-depth case study of England’s Highways Agency, this paper shows that the creation and replication of a new routine across multiple sites involves four sequential steps: envisioning, experimenting, entrenching and enacting. We contribute to the capabilities research in two ways: first, by showing how different organizational levels, capabilities and logics (cognitive and behavioural) shape the development of new routines; and second, by identifying how distinct evolutionary cycles of variation and selective retention occur during each step in the process. In contrast with prior research on replication as an exact copy of a template or existing routine, our study focuses on the replication of an entirely new routine (based on novel principles) that is adapted to fit local operational conditions during its large-scale replication across multiple sites. We draw upon insights from adjacent ‘practice research’ and suggest how capabilities and practice studies may complement each other in future research on the evolution of routines.     

Research and data-sharing policy in Sweden – neoliberal courses,forces and discourses*

ABSTRACT

The discourse of openness has proved to be a very powerful instrument for promoting new research policies and the (neoliberal) reforms of higher education in all so-called ‘advanced economies’. It has triggered positive democracy-, transparency-, and accountability-related associations when used in the context of politics, fair resource distribution when used in the sphere of public service, and free access to information and knowledge when used in the field of science and higher education. At the same time, international research shows that university autonomy is increasingly being attacked, reduced, and marginalized by the same policies. Power instances outside academia impose new criteria, such as ‘accountability,’ ‘performance,’ ‘quality assurance,’ and ‘good practice.’ They also impose ideas about what good research is, which scientific method is to be prioritized, and what good data are. The process of the de-professionalization, polarization, and proletarianization of the academic profession is increasingly affecting academia. However, none of this has much in common with the open-access discourse. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this discussion applies to Sweden. Courses, forces, and discourses of the national research infrastructure development policy in general, and qualitative data preservation policy in particular, are described and deliberated.     

颠覆产业世界的互联网基因

作为一种业界隐喻,互联网基因意指产品的三个特征:产品成为互联网终端,服务依托云平台,需求感知敏捷化。三个特征的现实展开形成产品形态革命的趋势,即整体来看产品演变成"三位一体"的服务体系,动态来看服务体系通过迭代创新形成永续生命周期,宏观来看服务体系之间互联互通从而形成智能生产网络。互联网基因之所以颠覆产业世界,根本原因在于能够以低成本创造出新价值。新价值主要是以产品或服务设施为载体在需求感知基础上提供的服务增加值,在线运营平台是实现这种增加值的核心资产,平台运营商依托平台资产能够对相关行业发动价值颠覆。文章以信息类终端产品、传统IT企业和中介行业为案例对此进行了说明,并强调在线运营平台将会成为各行各业的产业链中枢和竞争焦点。最后从历史角度说明,互联网基因既符合产业服务化的一贯趋势,又是此趋势中的巨大飞跃,它超出了产业技术革命理论的ICT(信息、通信和技术)范式框架,所引起变革的深度堪比工业革命以来社会化大生产的出现。