Title
Managing the complexity of new product development project from the perspectives of customer needs and entropy.
Abstract
To successfully develop a complex product, a firm must answer two critical questions: how to "develop the right product" and how to "develop the product right." Motivated by the real practice of Xiaomi's new product development (NPD) projects, this article responds to these calls in the following ways. To design the right product, using an enhanced PageRank algorithm to investigate customer needs, NPD managers can select appropriate function modules of the new product to meet customers' demand. To develop the new product in the right way, NPD managers should optimize the NPD organization. This article applies the multi-domain matrix (MDM) to identify the technical coordination dependency strength among different teams and then to measure the NPD organization's complexity according to its entropy. By proposing the External Entropy of Cluster (EEC) and Internal Entropy of Cluster (IEC), we develop an entropy-based two-stage clustering criterion of design structure matrix (DSM) to optimize the NPD organization. The first-stage clustering criterion maximizes the added average dependency strength of DSM, and the second-stage clustering criterion minimizes the Weighted Total Entropy, including the IEC and EEC. An industrial example is provided to illustrate the proposed model. The results indicate that the clustered DSM can reduce the organization's complexity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1177/1063293X18798001
CONCURRENT ENGINEERING-RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS
Keywords
Field
DocType
product development,customer needs,PageRank algorithms,organization design,design structure matrix,entropy
Engineering management,Customer needs,Organizational architecture,Design structure matrix,Engineering,Management science,New product development
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
26.0
4.0
1063-293X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
10
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qing Yang1303.76
Chen Shan200.34
Bin Jiang35218.13
Na Yang4194.49
Tao Yao5938.93