Research objective 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 within this product group was developed, each with another level of reuse of standard designs. Figure 11.1 shows that data were generated on seven scenarios with different realistic degrees of reuse of components.

11.3.6 Measurement

In order to generate realistic outcomes in terms of market share dependent on the timing of the market launch of the product, cur- rent knowledge of the market and of the process of new product devel- opment needed to be collected and, next, to be modelled in the computer program. Two models were built, one of the effect of the timing of the market launch of a new product on market share, and the other of the effect of the extent of reuse of standard designs on the throughput time. The output of the latter model a date following from a potentially shorter throughput time for development could be used as input for the first mentioned model.

11.3.7 Data presentation

Figure 11.1 shows the data on annual sales volume for seven cases with different levels of reuse of standard designs. Annual sales volume was chosen as a proxy for market share.

11.3.8 Data analysis

Testing the hypothesis, which represented a deterministic relation, consisted of, first, ranking the seven cases according to the independ- ent variable extent of reuse of standard designs as well as ranking them according to the dependent variable annual sales volume and, next, ascertaining that both rank orders were exactly the same see Chapter 6. Figure 11.1 shows that this was indeed the case. Therefore, the hypothesis was confirmed.

11.3.9 Implications for practice

Case Study 6 correctly made a distinction between a the results of the study and b what practitioners could do with these results. The outcome of the study was a confirmation of the hypothesis, implying Chapter 11