Research


Innovation

Innovation is the life blood of most product oriented enterprises. Without a steady stream of well-targeted new products, a firm can be quickly overtaken by the competition. Indeed, because of the rapid pace of innovation, time delays are frequently much more damaging than cost overruns in product development projects. Furthermore, roughly 70% of the costs associated with a product are fixed during the early stages of development. Hence, the product development process presents an key opportunity for improving both efficiency and competitiveness.

Researchers in the OPEM group have worked with industry partners to develop tools to facilitate "design for supply chain", which enable firms to incorporate production and logistics cost considerations into early product design stages. We have also used a combination of operations, economics and marketing tools to investigate the question of how much variety in product offerings a firm should offer.

Graduate Students

• Jie Xu

Published Papers

Working Papers