Track: Technology Management

Abstract

New product technology decisions are one of the most critical decisions that are made in early stages of the New Product Development (NPD) with huge impact on all downstream activities and product success in the market. Technology decisions are effected by technical and life cycle uncertainties. While new technologies offer higher competitive advantage by offering higher performance and flexibility, technical uncertainties associated with new technologies could also make the NPD process to be risky and challenging in terms of development cost and time to market. Demand uncertainties during the product life cycle make this problem even more risky and challenging.  In this research we propose a framework to manage the new product technology decisions in order to incorporate managerial flexibility into NPD projects to decrease technical and market risks, while increasing potential market value. In our framework, at each review stage, management can choose the technology or postpone this decision to the next review stage. By postponing the technology decision, we can acquire more information which helps us to resolve the uncertainty but simultaneously it may cause delay in product launch and significant profit loss. We handle the demand uncertainty using Monte Carlo simulation.  An illustrative example is presented to choose the battery pack control system in hybrid and electric vehicles.