Practice Methodological reflection on Case Study 6

firm about for how many components of new products standard designs should be reused in order to achieve a specific level of market share. A rejection of the hypothesis would inform the firm that market share cannot be increased by increasing the number of components for which standard designs are used, but will not be informative about alternative ways of increasing market share.

11.3.3 Research strategy

The experiment was the preferred strategy for testing a hypothesis that represents a deterministic relation. The firm could use standard designs to different degrees in a number of new product developments and then discover how market share varied. However, such an experiment, which would involve assigning different levels of reuse to different new product developments, would require considerable cost and risk that could not be justified by the objective of this research, i.e. merely problem find- ing. The next preferred strategy for testing the deterministic hypotheses would be a case study. A longitudinal case study of new product devel- opment in this firm in which the independent variable varies in time in the real life context, did not seem realistic. The use of a computer simu- lation model, which allows for the generation of virtual outcomes for analysis, was a solution for all mentioned problems, a the lack of suffi- cient variance in the independent variable in the practice of this firm, b the cost of collecting data about new product development projects, and c the costs and risks of experiments. As in Case Studies 3 and 4 see Chapters 6 and 7, the computer simulation model generated data on multiple cases scenarios for comparison.

11.3.4 Candidate cases

The domain of instances relevant for this practice new product devel- opment projects in this firm consisted of all possible ways in which new products could be developed by this firm. Obviously, this domain was limited to the range of new products that were realistic new prod- ucts for this firm.

11.3.5 Case selection

A product group was chosen in discussions with the “focus group” con- sisting of two senior managers. In the simulation, a range of new products