Integrated Decision Support System Considering Interdependencies Between Time-to-Market and Market Diffusion under Competition

Industry faces fundamental challenges as new competitors from emerging countries enter markets. Thus, competition increases and time-to-market as intermediate span between R&D and series production gets more important. Additionally, customers ask for more individualized products. However, the resulting increase in product variety leads to rising complexity and costs and thereby, limited resources have to be allocated to a multitude of parallel product development projects. To tackle these challenges and stay successful, companies aim at decreasing time-to-market with constant or even lower resource input. While complexity management and resource allocation have extensively been discussed for R&D and series production, approaches for the intermediate time-to-market phase are still scarce. Against this background, the aim of this contribution is to analyze the interrelations between time-to-market and resource allocation in a competitive environment with a decision support system. To reach this aim, we present a system-dynamics simulation model analyzing the market diffusion of a product in a competitive environment. with the proposed model, we are able to derive information on interdependencies between resource input and time-to-market depending on competitors' behavior. We apply the model to the gas turbine industry. In order to do so, we create a dataset merging recent data from literature with information gathered in expert interviews. Thus, we are able to quantify the parameters of the model. Results are presented highlighting the interdependencies between resources and time-to-market for the competitive environment of the gas turbine market. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.