Special Seminar on Technological Innovation
“Design Reuse in Manufacturing and Services”
by Professor John Ettlie, PhD
Director & Professor of Business Administration
The Technology Management Center
Rochester Institute of Technology
Thursday, May 4, 2006
4-6 pm
Dibner Library Building, Room LC433
Open Seminar. All interested are invited.
“Most professionals, actively engaged in design, live in a world of trade-offs. The most typical compromise is this: if you reduce the cost of design, quality suffers.”
- Prof. Ettlie
Through a survey of 42 companies, of which 23 were in manufacturing and 19 were in services, Professor Ettlie studied in depth one of the most popular approaches to improve the new-offering development process: design reuse.
His presentation will discuss the development of his hypothesis and the preliminary conclusions that came out of his study, most notably that:
- Not only is it possible to defeat the commonly accepted trade-off of cost, timing and innovation, but services and manufacturing are quite different in their approaches to design reuse and substitution.
- Policies for design reuse and internal sourcing will promote the complexity and breadth of reuse, which in turn will dampen the percentage of substitution and reduce the negative impact on innovativeness of new offerings.
- Sector and reuse are related: service was more likely than manufacturing to have high percentages of reuse, but
- Adoption of policies for encouragement or to mandate design reuse were significantly correlated with the extent of reuse among manufacturers but not services firms.
Professor Ettlie received his PhD at Northwestern University and has held appointments since then at the University of Illinois, Chicago; DePaul University; the Industrial Technology Institute; the University of Michigan Business School; the U.S. Business School in Prague; and Catolica University in Lisbon, Portugal. He has published over 70 refereed journal articles, 85 trade articles, and book chapters; and has made over 100 professional presentations, world-wide, on the management of technological innovation. His current research interests include service innovation (funded by the National Science Foundation grant with Boston University), idea sourcing of successful new products, and successful modifications of traditional phased approaches to new product development.
Sponsored by: The Institute for Technology and Enterprise
Department of Technology Management, Polytechnic Institute of NYU
