This paper is a review of research in product development, which we define as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. Our review is broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this breadth is in conveying the shape of the entire research landscape. We focus on product development projects within a single firm. We also devote our attention to the development of physical goods, although much of the work we describe applies to products of all kinds. We look inside the “black box ” of product development at the fundamental decisions that are made by intention or default. In doing so, we adopt the perspective of product development as a deliberate business process involving hundreds of decisions, many of which can be usefully supported by knowledge and tools. We contrast this approach to prior reviews of the literature, which tend to examine the importance of environmental and contextual variables, such as market growth rate, the competitive environment, or the level of top-management support.

Firms are undertaking growing numbers of e-commerce initiatives and increasingly making significant investments required to participate in the growing online market. However, empirical support for the benefits to firms from e-commerce is weaker than glowing accounts in the popular press, based on anecdotal evidence, would lead us to believe. In this paper, we explore the following questions: What are the returns to shareholders in firms engaging in e-commerce? How do the returns to conventional, brick and mortar firms from e-commerce initiatives compare with returns to the new breed of net firms? How do returns from businessto-business e-commerce compare with returns from business-to-consumer e-commerce? How do the returns to e-commerce initiatives involving digital goods compare to initiatives involving tangible goods? We examine these issues using event study methodology and assess the cumulative abnormal returns to shareholders (CARs) for 251 e-commerce initiatives announced by firms between October and December 1998. The results suggest that e-commerce initiatives do indeed lead to significant positive CARs for firms ’ shareholders. While the CARs for conventional firms are not significantly different from those for net firms, the CARs for businessto-consumer (B2C) announcements are higher than those for business-to-business (B2B) announcements.

The literature on electronic commerce (EC) and electronic marketplaces has long recognized the importance of different kinds of intermediaries and the different functions they serve [5]. The Internet is most often discussed in connection with digital intermediaries [76], as the displacement of traditional intermediaries. In this research, we propose a new conceptual framework for understanding how competition in business-tobusiness (B2B) EC in the presence of information technology (IT) innovations changes firm-level strategy choices and the structure of the marketplace. We also identify and discuss the economic forces that lead to these changes. In this context, we further describe a recurring pattern of intermediation, disintermediation and reintermediation through an "IDR framework." We also explain the impetus for technological reintermediation, where a disenfranchised traditional player is able to compete again, by leveraging technological innovations with co-specialized assets. W...

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Acknowledgements: The development of NeBIC theory has benefited greatly from the detailed guidance of the editor, associate editor, and reviewers. I also wish to thank research associate Michael Williams and Arvin Sayam for their valuable assistance and healthy debate in maturing the ideas presented here. NeBIC: A Dynamic Capabilities Theory for Assessing Net-enablement We propose the Net-enabled Business Innovation Cycle as an applied dynamic capabilities theory for measuring, predicting, and understanding a firm’s ability to create customer value through the business use of digital networks. The theory incorporates both a variance and process view of netenabled business innovation. It identifies four sequenced constructs: Choosing new IT, Matching with Economic Opportunities, Executing Business Innovation for Growth, and Assessing Customer Value, along with the processes and events that inter-relate them as a cycle. The sequence of these theorized relationships for net-enablement asserts that choosing IT precedes rather than aligns with corporate strategy. The theory offers a logically consistent and falsifiable basis for grounding research programs on metrics of net-enabled business innovation. NeBIC Page 1 1

The recent decade has witnessed a strong expansion of work on the firm, both from a capabilities perspective and from a contractual perspective. These two bodies of theories are often thought to be fundamentally different, because their domains of applications are different (knowledge-accumulation vs contracts and incentives). However, we need to integrate propositions from capabilities perspectives with ideas about economic organization (markets, hybrids, firms). This is because only a more unified theory will allow us to understand such issues as the dynamics of the modern corporation, and, more topically, the costs and benefits of outsourcing. I discuss the relations between these two bodies of theories. It is possible to argue in favor of a relation of complementarity between the two and pursue a research strategy on this basis. However, it is also possible two claim that they are rivals. Along this line, it is argued that the capabilities perspective contains propositions about economic organization that are not to be found within the modern Coasian approach to economic organization, and thus may be seen as a distinct emerging perspective on economic organization.

By identifying the possibility that technologies with inferior performance can displace established incumbents, the notion of disruptive technologies, pioneered by Christensen (1997), has had a profound effect on the way in which scholars and managers approach technology competition. While the phenomenon of disruptive technologies has been well documented, the underlying theoretical drivers of technology disruption are less well understood. This article identifies the demand conditions that enable disruptive dynamics. By examining how consumers evaluate technology and how this evaluation changes as performance improves, it offers new theoretical insight into the impact of the structure of the demand environment on competitive dynamics. Two new constructs—preference overlap and preference symmetry—are introduced to characterize the relationships among the preferences of different market segments. The article presents a formal model that examines how these relationships lead to the emergence of different competitive regimes. The model is analyzed using computer simulation. The theory and model results hold implications for understanding the dynamics of disruptive technologies and suggest new indicators for assessing disruptive threats. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. From S-curves (Foster, 1986), to technology

Business acquisition, resource redeployment, and asset divestiture are elements of a dynamic process in which firms change their businesses by recombining internal and external resources. Analyzing 253 horizontal acquisitions, we show that post-acquisition resource redeployment leads to asset divestiture from the business that receives the redeployed resources, but not from the business that contributes the new resources. Consistent with scale economies rationales, we find that strategic similarity also leads to greater asset divestiture from the target firms. Many theoretical perspectives are skeptical about the positive rationale for acquisitions and many of these believe that asset divestiture is evidence of acquisition failure. Our arguments and analysis help refine the accepted wisdom. In particular, the pattern of resource redeployment and asset divestiture in our analysis suggests that acquisitions provide a means of reconfiguring the structure of resources within firms and that asset divestiture is a logical consequence of this reconfiguration process. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This study examines the causes of asset divestiture following horizontal acquisitions. Asset divestiture is the partial or complete sale or disposal

This paper tests empirically the hypothesis that the greater the intangibility of a firm’s resources, the greater the sustainability of its competitive advantage. Resource intangibility is measured by: (1) Tobin’s q and (2) the predicted value from a hedonic regression of q on several accounting measures of intangibles. Sustainability is measured by the persistence of firm-specific profits. Using a dynamic panel data regression model, I find that intangibles play an effective role in sustaining a firm’s competitive advantage, as predicted by the resource-based view of the firm. However, the results suggest that intangibles can also lock firms into persistent disadvantages.