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Management of the business-government relationship is critical for firm performance in regulated industries. In this paper, we predict a U-shaped relationship between product complexity and the time to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Moreover, we argue that this association is contingent on the types of strategic alliances (i.e., R&D alliance, Marketing alliance) of the focal firm in that those alliances help FDA and pharmaceutical companies achieve harmony. Using the approved drugs by FDA from 1999 to 2016 as the sample, our hypotheses are supported by the empirical analysis on US pharmaceutical firms. The findings have important implications to achieving harmony between pharmaceutical firms and regulatory agencies.

Drawing on the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) theory, the present study investigates the underlying mechanisms through which capability control, a type of behavior-based control, influences salesperson turnover. Using a sample of 145 industrial salesperson–supervisor dyads from different industries, this study's findings reveal that capability control contributes to decreasing salesperson turnover intentions, both directly and indirectly. Specifically, management capability control reduces work overload and increases work meaning, thus lowering salesperson turnover intention. The findings also confirm that these effects are contingent on the complexity of a product. When product complexity is low, capability control increases work overload and decreases work meaning, which has a positive effect on salesperson turnover intention. This study discusses these findings' theoretical and managerial implications.

In the manufacturing field, the assembly process heavily affects product final quality and cost. Specific studies, concerning the causes of the assembly defects, showed that operator errors account for high percentage of the total defects. Also, models linking the assembly complexity with the operator-induced defect rate were developed. Basing on these models, the present paper proposes a new paradigm for designing inspection strategies in case of short-run productions, for which traditional approaches may not be carried out. Specifically, defect generation models are developed to get a priori predictions of the probability of occurrence of defects, which are useful for designing effective inspection procedures. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study concerning the assembly of mechanical components in the manufacturing of hardness testing machines.

Given the managerial/financial commitments needed for supplier development programs, buying firms need to be selective of the suppliers they engage for development. This paper examines the moderating role of five supply-side factors (i.e. supplier size, supply share, product complexity, buyer-supplier integration, and the supplier's management systems) in the relationship between supplier development and supplier performance, through a structural model, which is developed theoretically, and tested empirically using survey data of 142 firms. The results indicate that when supplier development is in the form of buyer direct involvement, its impact on supplier performance is significantly moderated by supplier size, product complexity, buyer-supplier integration, and the supplier's management systems. Meanwhile, the impact of supplier development, in the form of assessment/certification, is moderated by buyer-supplier integration. The outcomes of this paper fill the gaps in the existing knowledge of supplier development, and show the sensitivity of supplier development programs to some newly introduced supply-side factors.

This study presents a systematic literature review of the recent scholarly literature on product complexity (number, diversity, and interrelatedness of product variants and components) and operational performance (measured in terms of cost, time quality, and delivery reliability) in manufacturing and supply chain firms, considering the manufacturing context as well as the mechanisms behind the relationships. The results show that product complexity has a consistently negative relationship with cost, time, quality, and delivery performance measures, though the relationships with quality and delivery performance are less clear.

11th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems, Smart Product and Service Twin, Hong Kong, Peoples R China, 29 May 2019 - 31 May 2019; Procedia CIRP 83, 279-284 (2019). doi:10.1016/j.procir.2019.04.079 special issue: "11th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems / Edited by George Q Huang, Ting Qu, Matthias Thürer, Suxiu Xu, Mohamed Khalgui", Published by Elsevier, Amsterdam [u.a.]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop taxonomy of sourcing decision-making (SDM) archetypes and explore how different contextual factors influence these archetypes when global sourcing of complex components is considered a viable option. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case study approach with five in-depth cases is employed. In total, 19 interviews as well as publicly available and internal data from large buying firms headquartered in Austria and Germany were collected and analyzed. Findings The results reveal three different SDM archetypes which are described in detail (i.e. “consensus,” “argumentation” and “cabal”). Furthermore, it is found that these archetypes are mainly influenced by three contextual factors: sourcing maturity, product complexity and leadership style. The final model comprises six propositions which illustrate how these contextual factors determine companies’ SDM archetypes. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to theory development at the intersection of organizational buying behavior and the (global) SDM literature. Thereby, it answers the call for more rigorous investigation of the influence of contextual factors on SDM processes. Practical implications The findings enable practitioners to better understand and consequently manage SDM processes and their outcomes. By supporting decision-makers in identifying SDM archetypes, this study allows sourcing managers and teams to make better decisions by avoiding problems that occur in situations in which the preferred decision-making type would result in suboptimal decisions. Originality/value The study provides a first step toward taxonomy of SDM archetypes and is among the first that explores their underlying contextual factors.

Engineering companies face the challenges of increasing product variety and technology induced increasing complexity of products. If the company is not able to manage this complexity within the design process it will cause productivity losses and rising complexity costs along the value-chain. Lack of information and information asymmetries lead to sub-optimal decision-making and thus to sub-optimal product-production-system designs. Companies struggle to evaluate product designs out of a broader, multi-functional perspective to derive the optimal design for the customer and company. The central question which needs to be solved is how companies can overcome these disadvantages in the early stages of product and process development. Based on the existing product design assessment methodologies proposed by academic and industrial communities this paper addresses these problems by developing a novel concept to improve decision-making performance in the early design phase by integrating the complexity perspective into decision-making. The paper delivers a guideline how to build up a complexity index to condense complex information.

We propose a generalized NK-model of late-mover advantage where late-mover firms leapfrog first-mover firms as user needs evolve over time. First movers face severe trade-offs between the provision of functionalities in which their products already excel and the additional functionalities requested by users later on. Late movers, by contrast, start searching when more functionalities are already known and typically come up with superior product designs. We also show that late-mover advantage is more probable for more complex technologies. Managerial implications follow.

International audience; We introduce the concept of product complexity in an endogenous growth model with renewable energy and expanding product variety à la Grossman and Helpman (1991). We describe the complexity of a product as an increasing function of the variety of inputs it consists of. Considering that energy is necessary to all human activities (including research), we highlight what type of long run growth path is possible according to (a) the potential of energy efficiency gains in the various human activities and (b) the effect of the product complexity on the energy intensiveness of its production process. In a finite world, a neoclassical growth path where economic growth can be both quantitative and non-quantitative (i.e. takes the form of an increase in the quantity of produced goods and in the product variety) is only possible if the potential of energy efficiency gains is unbounded in all human activities. If the energy intensiveness of the final production is bounded from below by a strictly positive constant, quantitative growth is not possible in the long run but non-quantitative growth may persist if (i) the impact of product complexity on the energy intensiveness of production is null or weak enough and (ii) the energy intensiveness of research activities tends to zero. If these conditions are not met, no form of long run growth is possible.

Contains fulltext : 157402.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The purpose of this study is to investigate whether product complexity moderates the impact of integration programs in both new product development (NPD) and supply chain (SC) management on operational performance. Results are based on statistical analyses of data collected from an international sample of manufacturing firms through the fifth edition of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS 5). The main findings are that NPD and SC integration do have an impact on performance, while product complexity alone has not. When considering the moderating effect, complexity has no impact on NPD integration, while there is a negative moderating impact on SC integration. This study bridges together different streams of research, showing how both NPD and SC integration allow managing product complexity while improving performance. 17 april 2015

This paper studies how the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regime in destination countries influences the way multinationals structure the international organization of their production. In particular, we explore how multinationals divide tasks of different complexities across countries with different levels of IPR protection. The analysis studies the decision of firms between procurement from related parties and outsourcing to independents suppliers at the product level. It also breaks down outsourcing into two types by distinguishing whether or not they involve technology sharing between the two parties. We combine data from a French firm-level survey on the mode choice for each transaction with a newly developed complexity measure at the product level. Our results confirm that firms are generally reluctant to source highly complex goods from outside firm boundaries. By studying the interaction between product complexity and the IPR protection, we obtain that (i) for technology-sharing-outsourcing IPRs promote outsourcing of more complex goods to a destination country by guaranteeing the protection of their technology, (ii) for non-technology-related-outsourcing IPRs attract the outsourcing of less complex products that are more prone to reverse engineering and simpler to decodify and imitate.

HCERES Rang A; International audience; The aim of this paper is to highlight the effect of irreversibility in partner choice in inter-firm collaborations. In an environment where firms are binded by contractual constraints regarding the duration of partnerships, how does the tacitness and complexity influence the overall knowledge in the industry? Through an agent based simulation model, we compare the knowledge generation in irreversible and reversible systems in two regimes as tacit and codified. The emerging network structures are also analysed. The results reveal that, in tacit regimes irreversible systems generate more knowledge only when product complexity is at an intermediate level. The work leading to this paper has been supported by the ANR Grant ANCORA (Analyse de la production de Connaissances par la Recherche Académique; ANR-06-APPR-003), in addition to NoE DIME (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe, EU 6th FP, grant N° 513396) and EU 7th FP, AEGIS (Contract No.225134). In addition, we would like to thank Robin Cowan and two anonymous referees for their comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Focussing on the "McCabe family" of measures for the decision/logic structure of a program, leads to an evaluation of extensions to modularization, nesting and, potentially, to object-oriented program structures. A comparison of rated, operating and essential complexities of programs suggests two new metrics: "inessential complexity" as a measure of unstructuredness and "product complexity" as a potential objective measure of structural complexity. Finally, nesting and abstraction levels are considered, especially as to how metrics from the "McCabe family" might be applied in an object-oriented systems development environment.

We offer a critical reflection on one of the key reasons for the startlingly low success rate of innovation initiatives worldwide – the fact that the interactive environment surrounding the customer is a critical part of the adoption process; it can and should be designed in a way that enables customer creativity, and thus adoption. In this article, we embrace a definition of innovation as “the adoption of a new practice by a community” where the innovator is the one who does not only sense and move into new opportunities but also mobilizes all the necessary resources needed by customers to adopt a new practice. The emphasis on adoption merges together innovation and entrepreneurship by shifting the focus from the inventor and the designer, through the entrepreneur, to the ultimate recipient of the innovative outcomes. Looking at customers as co-creators is critically important for technological product adoption; missing the chance to enable their creativity is equivalent to missing the opportunity of seeing them for who they really are. The result is a distorted vision that is ultimately rooted in the misconception of the dynamics of customer value. We particularly emphasize two points: i) the increasing degree of complexity of everyday technological products requires a higher degree of creativity by customers to adopt; and ii) customer creativity is not only a function of user-technology interaction, it is a function of the various actors in the interactive environment surrounding the customer such as other customers, other technologies, local distributors, customer/technical support providers, and competitors. It is absurd to claim that our customers are missing! So say surprised skeptics seeing our claim of missing customers. What if our problem with value is rooted in a misconception of our customers, the people we are creating value for?