Over the past several decades, digitization has invaded all areas of human activity, including innovation. The result of digitization of existing tools for design and collaboration, and the introduction of entirely new digital tools, is a far more substantive change of innovation than previous generations of tools enabled. It affects not only the quality of the output and speed of its generation, but it affects the innovation work itself, changes work content, collaboration patterns, decision authority, organizational set‐ups, governance structures, firm boundaries, and ultimately entire ecosystems. In this paper, the digitization of New Product Development (NPD), a subset of innovation, is studied to pursue two research questions: (1) How has the digital tool landscape in NPD changed over the past 15 years, and (2) how have these changes affected how firms innovate? This research uses a longitudinal multi‐method, qualitative approach to deep dive into actual use cases of digital design tools such as computer‐aided design CAD and new tools such as collaborative information technology (CIT). The changes in these tools and observations into how these tools are transforming the very nature of how things are designed is the research focus of this study. These tools have become increasingly more sophisticated while being easier to use and are integrated earlier in the design process. As a result, digital tools have a far broader reaching impact than previous generation of tools. Not only do they affect output and process efficiency, but they also increase depth and breadth of the work of individual innovators, they lead to rearrangement of the entire innovation processes, enable new configurations of people, teams, and firms, and rewrite the rules on how knowledge management acts as a critical competitive capability. The progression of digitization is laying the groundwork for changes to what firms are and do and points to different ways of organizing, specializing, and training for NPD professionals.

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collaboratively design, manage, and launch new products and services. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what influence these new IT tools have on NPD performance. Through a project-level, exploratory, empirical study, the impact of these new IT tools on the development phase of the NPD process is investigated. We find that the use of these new tools is significantly lower than the adoption of traditional IT tools such as e-mail and computeraided-design. Traditional tools have a significant, positive impact on NPD outcomes, including team collaboration, the concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Interestingly, new media tools such as project wikis and shared collaboration spaces also have a significant, positive impact on concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Surprisingly, social networking tools like weblogs and Twitter negatively impact management evaluation while having no impact on NPD team collaboration and concepts/prototypes generated. These results suggest that social networking tools in their current guise are not helpful to the NPD team and may in fact be distracting to innovation management during the development phase.

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New product development practices (NPD) have been well studied for decades in large, established companies. Implementation of best practices such as predevelopment market planning and cross-functional teams have been positively correlated with product and project success over a variety of measures. However, for small new ventures, field research into ground-level adoption of NPD practices is lacking. Because of the risks associated with missteps in new product development and the potential for firm failure, understanding NPD within the new venture context is critical.Through in-depth case research, this paper investigates two successful physical product-based early-stage firms' development processes versus large established firm norms. The research focuses on the start-up adoption of commonly prescribed management processes to improve NPD, such as cross-functional teams, use of market planning during innovation development, and the use of structured processes to guide the development team. This research has several theoretical implications.The first finding is that in comparing the innovation processes of these firms to large, established firms, the study found several key differences from the large firm paradigm. These differences in development approach from what is prescribed for large, established firms are driven by necessity from a scarcity of resources. These new firms simply did not have the resources (financial or human) to create multi-or cross-functional teams or organizations in the traditional sense for their first product. Use of virtual resources was pervasive. Founders also played multiple roles concurrently in the organization, as opposed to relying on functional departments so common in large firms. The NPD process used by both firms was informal-much more skeletal than commonly recommended structured processes. The data indicated that these firms put less focus on managing the process and more emphasis on managing their goals (the main driver being getting the first product to market). In addition to little or no written procedures being used, development meetings did not run to specific paper-based deliverables or defined steps. In terms of market and user insight, these activities were primarily performed inside the core team-using methods that again were distinctive in their approach. What drove a project to completion was relying on team experience or a "learn as you go approach." Again, the driver for this type of truncated market research approach was a lack of resources and need to increase the project's speed-to-market.Both firms in our study were highly successful, from not only an NPD efficiency standpoint but also effectiveness. The second broad finding we draw from this work is that there are lessons to be learned from start-ups for large, established firms seeking ever-increasing efficiency. We have found that small empowered teams leading projects substantial in scope can be extremely effective when roles are expanded, decision power is ground-level, and there is little emphasis ...

Recent advances in manufacturing technology, such as cyber–physical systems, industrial Internet, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and machine learning have driven the evolution of manufacturing architectures into integrated networks of automation devices, services, and enterprises. One of the resulting challenges of this evolution is the increased need for interoperability at different levels of the manufacturing ecosystem. The scope ranges from shop–floor software, devices, and control systems to Internet-based cloud-platforms, providing various services on-demand. Successful implementation of interoperability in smart manufacturing would, thus, result in effective communication and error-prone data-exchange between machines, sensors, actuators, users, systems, and platforms. A significant challenge to this is the architecture and the platforms that are used by machines and software packages. A better understanding of the subject can be achieved by studying industry-specific communication protocols and their respective logical semantics. A review of research conducted in this area is provided in this article to gain perspective on the various dimensions and types of interoperability. This article provides a multi-faceted approach to the research area of interoperability by reviewing key concepts and existing research efforts in the domain, as well as by discussing challenges and solutions.