Title: Product development flexibility in a changing business environment

Authors: Amy Y. Chou

Addresses: School of Information Technology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

Abstract: Increasing global competition has instilled a high degree of uncertainty into the business environment. A firm|s capability to deal with uncertainty is increasingly important. While facing the business environmental change, each industry may face a distinctive rate of business evolution. The product life cycle in the electronic industry is much shorter than that in the utility industry. In the changing business environment, any firm that possesses a higher clock speed would enhance its product development flexibility to hedge against market uncertainty. This paper proposes a research model to depict the relationship among firm|s clock speed, the supplier involvement, Concurrent Engineering (CE) practices and product development flexibility.

Keywords: clock speed; product development; flexibility; supplier involvement; concurrent engineering; simultaneous engineering; changing environment; market uncertainty; supplier involvement; resource-based view.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISCM.2006.010323

International Journal of Information Systems and Change Management, 2006 Vol.1 No.2, pp.177 - 186

Published online: 14 Jul 2006 *

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