International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

An ongoing field study of 76 new product development teams in 27 companies identifies specific barriers and drivers to effective team performance. The paper provides insight into the affects of organizational environment and managerial leadership on project team performance in technology-oriented team environments. The results show that team leadership has significant impact on both the project team and its broader organizational environment ultimately affecting team and project performance. Team leaders must manage the work and people relations across diverse organizational and cultural boundaries, including support functions, suppliers, sponsors and partners. The paper provides suggestions for building the organizational environment, work processes and leadership skills necessary for successful implementation of complex development projects.

The development of new and improved management methods for new product development is important. Existing methods suffer from a number of shortcomings, especially their inability to deal with a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data. The objective of this study is to apply decision support techniques (especially Bayesian networks) to the area of new product development management in order to address some of the shortcomings.

The research approach is one of decision structuring and modeling. The literature shows the criteria that are important during the management of new product development. These criteria are used in a three-step decision structuring framework to develop a conceptual model based on a Bayesian network, in support of new product development management. The result is a Bayesian network that incorporates the knowledge of experts into a decision support model. The model is shown to be requisite because it contains all the essential elements of the problem on which decision-makers can base their action.

The model can be used to perform 'what-if' analyses in various ways, thereby supporting the management of risk in new product development. This research not only contributes a model to support new product development management, but also provides insight into how decision support — especially Bayesian networks — can enhance technology management methods.

The success of large-scale innovative projects is increasingly a function of the marriage of multiple complex technologies and the ability to articulate and capture economic benefits. For corporations, the decision to pursue particular projects often hinges on the creation of, or the ability to appropriate, requisite technologies in a manner that will allow for an adequate return on investment for project shareholders. The business model is a tool that can be used to help determine whether or not a project has the necessary components for successful completion. A business model articulates a business venture's value proposition, market segment, cost and profit structure, value chain, value network, and competitive strategy. While business models are commonly used at the corporate level, they can also be applied to projects in order to convey how the potential of multiple converging technological inputs lead to the creation of sustainable economic value outputs, often in the face of technical and market uncertainty. Empirical observations from the biopharmaceutical and aerospace industries reveal that projects with incomplete business models face considerable complications, while projects with complete business models face less difficulty with respect to execution. As such, companies can use business models as a tool for making project go/no go decisions whereby only projects with complete business models are allowed to progress through the development process.

There has been considerable growth in the use of Virtual Teams in the past decade, and further growth is broadly assumed. Researchers investigating Virtual Teams describe problems these teams encounter, assert that training for virtual team assignments is necessary, and offer suggestions on the issues that such training should address. Further evidence of the training need is that a fortune 100 company employed the primary author to develop the initial version of a virtual team training simulation for their internal use. The 'Virtual Team Challenge' is being used in the Rose-Hulman Project Management course. Participants manage a simulated project for three hours. To successfully complete the project within schedule, they must avoid or resolve problems typically encountered by virtual teams. Participants receive advice and are guided to adopt best practices as defined by our literature review and those offered by the client.

This study aims to contribute to the Knowledge Management Theory under a social perspective. It evaluates the Knowledge Management Cycle applied in a Brazilian high technology-based industry, a former national company which had been privatized in 1994, and passed through a huge organizational transformation and, after few years, became a market leader in one of the most competitive business sectors. Social organization covers Corporative Culture, Human Resources and Leadership aspects seen as knowledge enablers. This research used a qualitative approach and took a Knowledge Management Model developed by the Fraunhoffer Institute researchers and associates as a reference. Conclusions indicated that in order to become competitive in the new Management Model the studied company had to develop a cluster of human and business competencies. These were developed through educational processes which included personnel and leadership development. Organizational Culture had also contributed to KM process nurturing a sense of continuous improvement, customer and shareholder satisfaction.

The objective of the research presented in this paper is to study the relationship between practices for managing external sources of information and the innovative performance of the enterprise. The research can be characterized as mostly quantitative. The data had been collected from a sample of Brazilian enterprises recognized as being very commited with technological innovation activities. The findings of the study suggest many significant relationships between the innovation performance of the enterprise and kind of sources of technological information used as well as with the access modalities to this external sources. The results suggest, also, a trend towards an increasing of the use of external sources of technological information and the existence, regarding this matter, of a large space for improvements of the actual managerial practices adopted by the enterprises.