bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rolling Out New Products Across Country Markets: An Empirical Study of Causes of Delays
Authors: Chryssochoidis George M. , Wong Veronica 
Published: October 2003

Faced with the challenge of launching a new product into numerous countries, managers may view a sequential rollout as the prudent course of action. Rather than launching the product simultaneously in diverse countries, they may believe they can reduce risk by launching first in one or two countries, and then in others. However, this strategy overlooks the interplay between timeliness in international new product rollouts (INPR) and product success.George M. Chryssochoidis and Veronica Wong explore these issues in a study of 30 high‐tech products launched into multiple European markets. Their study has three objectives: examining the incidence of timeliness and delays in simultaneous and sequential INPR; exploring the causes of delays in INPR; and assessing the effects that INPR timeliness and delays have on new product outcomes. They define timeliness in INPR as the availability of the new product to the firm's multiple target markets within the time frame planned by the company's managers. In other words, timeliness in this study reflects a company's capability for adhering to the schedule that management has established.Contrary to expectations, the results of this study do not reveal direct effects on timeliness in INPR from such sources as diversity of target markets or the firm's external environment. These results suggest that firms can achieve on‐time, multicountry rollout of new products notwithstanding the legal, technological, and competitive environment. For the firms in this study, timeliness in INPR depends on such factors as sufficiency of marketing and technological resources (for example, to train sales staff, provide after‐sales service, and adapt the product for multiple markets), proficiency in executing new product development activities, and effective communication between a company's headquarters and its business units and customers in different countries.Among the 22 product launches categorized as sequential rollouts in this study, 15 experienced delays. All eight of the simultaneous launches were timely. The results of this study indicate a positive relationship between timeliness in INPR and new‐product success. Conversely, for the firms in this study, delays in INPR resulted in lower‐than‐expected product sales and profitability. In other words, the seemingly less risky sequential launch strategy may actually increase the risk of new product failure by delaying product rollout in multiple markets.
From Experience: Securing Sponsors and Funding for New Product Development Projects—The Human Side of Enterprise
Authors: Tighe Gary 
Published: October 2003

Gaining approval for a project requires playing a role that may be unfamiliar for many new‐product development (NPD) professionals—that of salesperson. The NPD professional must sell management on the market potential of the product concept, and persuade management to commit the resources needed for transforming the concept into a marketable product. Finding a well‐placed sponsor within the company's management ranks can improve the chances of obtaining approval for a project, but securing sponsorship is, in many respects, yet another sales job.Gary Tighe offers guidance for NPD professionals who must sell their projects to potential sponsors. He describes the key steps in the process of securing a sponsor, he gives guidelines for choosing the right sponsor based on the nature of the project, and he provides practical advice for developing a presentation that will gain the support of a prospective sponsor and company management. He then presents a vignette that illustrates the principles he discusses.He identifies three elements that are necessary for securing a sponsor and obtaining funding for a proposed project: clearly defining the project, its scope, and its objective; specifying how the proposed project affects the prospective sponsor and that person's organization; and detailing the project's effects on revenue, profits, cost, or output. These elements forge a strong link between project outcomes and the interests of the sponsor, the sponsor's organization, and the company as a whole.Choosing the right sponsor requires careful consideration of the project's expected effects on specific functional areas and the entire organization, the resources required, the project objectives, and time constraints. For example, senior management sponsorship is essential for projects that cut across existing organizational boundaries. After helping to ensure that projects receive adequate funding, sponsors may serve as advisers to project teams, and they may provide additional resources if a team encounters unexpected problems. Through regular progress reports and sponsor participation in team meetings, the project team can ensure the active, ongoing support of the sponsor.
Key Factors Affecting Customer Evaluation of Discontinuous New Products
Authors: Veryzer Robert W. 
Published: October 2003

Common sense, as well as plenty of research, tells us that customer feedback can play an important role in successful product development efforts. By understanding the key factors that affect customers' evaluations of a new product, a project team improves its chances of making the right decisions throughout the design and development effort. However, customers typically lack a useful frame of reference for evaluating discontinuous, or really new products. In all likelihood, the key factors that affect customers' evaluations of radically new products differ from those for incremental innovations.Robert Veryzer describes the results of a study that examines the customer research efforts and findings of seven firms involved in the development of discontinuous new products. This study has the following objectives: gaining insight into the customer research inputs such companies use during the development of discontinuous new products, and exploring the critical factors that influence customers' evaluations of these really new products.The subjects in this study conducted relatively little formal customer research during the early stages of the NPD projects. The methods used for obtaining customer input during the concept generation and exploration stages were primarily qualitative. Although the companies in the study still did not focus consistently on customer issues during the technical development and design stage, the less discontinuous projects did use such traditional quantitative techniques as concept tests, clinics, and experiments during this phase of NPD. Throughout the projects in this study, the real opportunities for obtaining customer input came during the prototype testing and commercialization phases of the NPD projects.Several key factors appeared to influence customer evaluations of the products that were being developed by the NPD teams in this study. Lack of familiarity was manifested in customers' resistance to the new products in the study. Similarly, unfamiliarity with these new products often seemed to lead customers to focus on product attributes that development team members viewed as relatively unimportant. Other factors that affected customer evaluation of the products in this study included customer uncertainty about the benefits and risks associated with the product, customers' ability to understand how the product operates, perceptions of the product's safety, and product aesthetics.
Commercializing Nascent Technology: The Case of Laser Diodes at Sony
Authors: Wood Samuel C. , Brown Gary S. 
Published: October 2003

To develop really new products, a company often needs to get a handle on really new technologies. Although some breakthrough products simply combine existing technologies in novel ways, other innovations require the successful commercialization of nascent technologies. In other words, such innovations depend on entirely new structures and methods that have been demonstrated in a research environment but have not yet been refined to the point where they are ready for production. The path from nascent technology to full‐scale production presents numerous managerial challenges that must be overcome if a company is to develop really new products that involve really new technologies.Samuel Wood and Gary Brown discuss these challenges, and they describe methods for managing the successful commercialization of nascent technologies. They illustrate these methods by examining Sony's commercialization of laser diodes—semiconductor devices that play an important role in the operation of CD players and other optical disk readers.They divide the process of commercializing nascent technology into three stages: appropriation, implementation, and manufacture. The first stage—appropriation—involves monitoring, assessing, and capturing new technologies. Sony handles this stage with a small, loosely structured research organization, separate from the development organization. In this stage, management must ensure that the objectives pursued by the research organization support the development organization's long‐term goals. To foster coordination between research and development, Sony employs such network‐building techniques as internal research symposia and technology expositions, orientation periods for researchers, transferring managers between research and development, and transferring researchers to development and other functions.The implementation stage involves transferring knowledge to development, as well as refining the technology to the point where it is reproducible, testable, and documented. Sony facilitates technology commercialization by transferring project team members from research to development and making those people responsible for implementation. To reach the final stage, manufacture, the firm must find the means for developing and refining mass production tools and procedures. Meeting this challenge requires close interaction and integration between process and production engineers.
From Experience: Linking Available Resources and Technologies to Create a Solution for Document Sharing—The Early Years of the WWW
Authors: Hameri Ari‐Pekka , Nordberg Markus 
Published: October 2003

We live and work in an era when seemingly every waking minute brings an invitation to visit yet another site on the World Wide Web. Inundated with calls to check out www.whatever.com, we can easily lose sight of the fact that the birth of the Web is part of our very recent history. And notwithstanding the proliferation of personal and corporate vanity pages on the Web, this world of hyperlinks and hot spots has brought about dramatic changes in the means by which many individuals and organizations communicate, work, and trade. For new‐products professionals interested in the processes that give rise to radical innovations, what lessons can be learned from the development of the World Wide Web?To gain insight into the process that resulted in the development of the first Web browser and Web server software, Ari‐Pekka Hameri and Markus Nordberg examined project proposals, e‐mail exchanges, and other documentation, and they interviewed key personnel who were involved in the process. From this research, they were able to document the process and the environmental constraints that shaped the development and diffusion of the tools and technologies that form the foundation of the World Wide Web.Although a staggeringly diverse range of Web‐related services and applications have surfaced during the past few years, the original Web tools and technologies were targeted for a relatively small, focused community of researchers. Specifically, the origins of the World Wide Web are found in efforts aimed at meeting the information‐sharing needs of researchers in the realm of high‐energy physics. This far‐flung group required a global network that could facilitate the interchange of documents stored in diverse formats on a wide variety of computing platforms.Meeting those needs required neither excessive R&D investments nor radically new core technologies. Instead, the solution involved the integration of existing technologies—networking tools and protocols, document formats, and desktop applications and development tools—by an innovator who had both the necessary vision and firsthand knowledge of the practical benefits that were needed. From a management perspective, perhaps the key lesson learned involves giving R&D personnel both the freedom and the support to initiate new projects and studies.
From Experience: Linking Product Innovation to Business Growth
Authors: Patterson Marvin L. 
Published: October 2003

Industry pundits often take managers to task for their supposedly myopic approach to planning and decision making. These sweeping generalizations gloss over the complex challenges confronting the managers who must ensure that their firms enjoy ongoing revenue growth opportunities. In place of pat answers, those managers require analysis and planning tools that offer clearer insights into the effects their decisions have on their firms' continued business success.As Marv Patterson points out, however, determining the effects of product innovation decisions poses a particular challenge for management, because the consequences of those decisions typically do not become evident until long after the decisions have been made. Presenting a conceptual model that links product innovation activities to revenue growth, he identifies three drivers of revenue growth, and explains how these growth drivers are linked by a set of mathematical relationships that can be presented in the form of an enterprise‐specific growth table. He applies the model to three types of enterprises, and he discusses the key implications that the model holds for the business leaders who must keep shareholders satisfied.He depicts the relationship between a company and its customers as a closed‐loop system in which the company converts labor, parts, and material into products, which it delivers to customers. The company invests a portion of the resulting revenue stream in the resources that generate new products. By effectively and continually applying a sufficiently large investment in this innovation engine, the company creates an ongoing stream of new products. The revenues from these new products more than offset the drop in revenues from products that are approaching obsolescence.He identifies three factors that drive revenue growth from these investments in the innovation engine: the fraction of revenues invested in product innovation, new product revenue gain, and the behavior of revenue over time for a particular business. Using a graph called a product vintage chart, he demonstrates that for a large company, the revenue contributions of a particular new‐product year (or vintage) fall into a regular pattern over time, which enables a company to determine mathematical relationships for revenue growth as a function of R&D investment and new product revenue growth. In this way, senior managers can gain clearer understanding of the interplay between product innovation, R&D investment, revenue growth, and profitability over time.
Managing Conflict in Software Development Teams: A Multilevel Analysis
Authors: Gobeli David H. , Koenig Harold F. , Bechinger Iris 
Published: October 2003

For a new product development (NPD) organization, a little conflict can be a good thing. Healthy disagreements can push project team members or different functional groups in an organization to pursue more in‐depth, insightful analysis. This type of creative tension can help to engender an environment that encourages innovation and thus keeps NPD efforts free from the business‐as‐usual doldrums. However, management must ensure that conflict remains on a healthy level.David H. Gobeli, Harold F. Koenig, and Iris Bechinger note that conflict must be managed not only to increase the satisfaction of project team members, but also to achieve strategic project success. To provide better understanding of the important issues in conflict management, they examine the effects of three conflict factors on software development project success: context, conflict intensity, and conflict management style. Using survey responses from 117 software professionals and managers, they develop a multi‐level framework of success versus conflict for team‐based, software development projects. Within this framework, they examine context, conflict intensity, and conflict management approaches at the team and organization levels.For the participants in this study, unresolved conflict has a strong, negative effect on overall software product success and customer satisfaction. Project team member satisfaction decreases substantially with higher intensity conflict at the organization level, and even more strongly at the project level. For the respondents to this study, the combined effects of conflict intensity and conflict management style on project success are significant, but they are not as great as the combined effects of such context variables as company goals, group dynamics, and management support.Two conflict management styles—confronting and give and take—have beneficial effects on success at the organization level for the firms in this study. Smoothing, withdrawal, and forcing all have negative effects, although only forcing has a statistically significant negative effect. In general terms, the results suggest that management should guard against frequent use of the dysfunctional management styles—withdrawal, smoothing, and forcing. The results suggest that emphasis on confrontation—that is, true problem solving—is essential at the project level, even if a give‐and‐take style is better tolerated at the organization level.
Purification and Characterization of a Novel Bacteriocin Produced by
Enterococcus faecalis
Strain RJ-11
Authors: Yamamoto Yukio , Togawa Yoshikazu , Shimosaka Makoto , Okazaki Mitsuo 
Published: October 2003

ABSTRACT

Lactic acid bacteria exhibiting activity against the gram-positive bacterium
Bacillus subtilis
were isolated from rice bran. One of the isolates, identified as
Enterococcus faecalis
RJ-11, exhibited a wide spectrum of growth inhibition with various gram-positive bacteria. A bacteriocin purified from culture fluid, designated enterocin RJ-11, was heat stable and was not sensitive to acid and alkaline conditions, but it was sensitive to several proteolytic enzymes. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis analysis revealed that enterocin RJ-11 had a molecular weight of 5,000 in its monomeric form. The amino acid sequence determined for purified enterocin RJ-11 exhibited high levels of similarity to the sequences of enterocins produced by
Enterococcus faecium
.
Glutathione Protects
Lactococcus lactis
against Oxidative Stress
Authors: Li Yin , Hugenholtz Jeroen , Abee Tjakko , Molenaar Douwe 
Published: October 2003

ABSTRACT

Glutathione was found in several dairy
Lactococcus lactis
strains grown in M17 medium. None of these strains was able to synthesize glutathione. In chemically defined medium,
L. lactis
subsp.
cremoris
strain SK11 was able to accumulate up to ∼60 mM glutathione when this compound was added to the medium. Stationary-phase cells of strain SK11 grown in chemically defined medium supplemented with glutathione showed significantly increased resistance (up to fivefold increased resistance) to treatment with H
2
O
2
compared to the resistance of cells without intracellular glutathione. The resistance to H
2
O
2
treatment was found to be dependent on the accumulation of glutathione in 16 strains of
L. lactis
tested. We propose that by taking up glutathione,
L. lactis
might activate a glutathione-glutathione peroxidase-glutathione reductase system in stationary-phase cells, which catalyzes the reduction of H
2
O
2
. Glutathione reductase, which reduces oxidized glutathione, was detectable in most strains of
L. lactis
, but the activities of different strains were very variable. In general, the glutathione reductase activities of
L. lactis
subsp.
lactis
are higher than those of
L. lactis
subsp.
cremoris
, and the activities were much higher when strains were grown aerobically. In addition, glutathione peroxidase is detectable in strain SK11, and the level was fivefold greater when the organism was grown aerobically than when the organism was grown anaerobically. Therefore, the presence of glutathione in
L. lactis
could result in greater stability under storage conditions and quicker growth upon inoculation, two important attributes of successful starter cultures.
Diversity of Nitrile Hydratase and Amidase Enzyme Genes in
Rhodococcus erythropolis
Recovered from Geographically Distinct Habitats
Authors: Brandão Pedro F. B. , Clapp Justin P. , Bull Alan T. 
Published: October 2003

ABSTRACT

A molecular screening approach was developed in order to amplify the genomic region that codes for the α- and β-subunits of the nitrile hydratase (NHase) enzyme in rhodococci. Specific PCR primers were designed for the NHase genes from a collection of nitrile-degrading actinomycetes, but amplification was successful only with strains identified as
Rhodococcus erythropolis
. A hydratase PCR product was also obtained from
R. erythropolis
DSM 43066
T
, which did not grow on nitriles. Southern hybridization of other members of the nitrile-degrading bacterial collection resulted in no positive signals other than those for the
R. erythropolis
strains used as positive controls. PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism-single-strand conformational polymorphism (PRS) analysis of the hydratases in the
R. erythropolis
strains revealed unique patterns that mostly correlated with distinct geographical sites of origin. Representative NHases were sequenced, and they exhibited more than 92.4% similarity to previously described NHases. The phylogenetic analysis and deduced amino acid sequences suggested that the novel
R. erythropolis
enzymes belonged to the iron-type NHase family. Some different residues in the translated sequences were located near the residues involved in the stabilization of the NHase active site, suggesting that the substitutions could be responsible for the different enzyme activities and substrate specificities observed previously in this group of actinomycetes. A similar molecular screening analysis of the amidase gene was performed, and a correlation between the PRS patterns and the geographical origins identical to the correlation found for the NHase gene was obtained, suggesting that there was coevolution of the two enzymes in
R. erythropolis
. Our findings indicate that the NHase and amidase genes present in geographically distinct
R. erythropolis
strains are not globally mixed.