Edward Elgar Publishing Managing New Product Development and Innovation: A Microeconomic Toolbox (New Horizons in the Economics of Innovation series)

Product Description Managing New Product Development and Innovation provides a new approach to the microeconomics of innovation by measuring the technical quality of new products and guiding the managers of innovation and technology in the central considerations of today's knowledge-based companies. The volume features a selection of practical microeconomic tools for managing new product development and innovation. By quantifying product features and evaluating the costs and market value of improvements, a simple yet powerful conceptual framework is created. Using this framework, creative business models can be built, along with innovative products, services and processes that achieve marketplace success. The authors address five key questions facing managers of knowledge-based companies:•⊂ Which new features should be added to existing products?•⊂ Which radically new features should be innovated?•⊂ How can marketing and R&D be integrated?•⊂ How can the value of brand names be estimated and optimized?•⊂ How can the sophistication of product technology be measured - both at a given point in time and between two points in time? This path-breaking volume will be essential reading for managers of innovation, and will be warmly welcomed by teachers and advanced students with an interest in innovation and industrial economics. Review '. . . the recent volume by Professors Hariolf Grupp and Shlomo Maital is a masterpiece, a book that may appear once in a generation. Only the quest for creativity brings scholars like them to work each day. . . The volume is an essential reading for both practitioners and academics. Hariolf Grupp and Shlomo Maital have delighted us with a long-awaited and formidable intellectually strong book that properly addresses the thorny issues of the economics of innovation in a new millennium. The volume is very well written. It is concise, well organized, with a clear flow of arguments and facts, leading to clearly stated conclusions. Each chapter includes an adequate self-contained summary. In each chapter we usually find a quantitative model that deals with the issues posed, but these models are not an obstacle for someone less mathematically savvy; on the contrary, the analysis is accessible to the general reader. The conclusions are substantive, follow from the analyses, and offer remarkable insights. Most important though, the volume recently published by Professors Hariolf Grupp and Shlomo Maital invites us to embark on a spiritual journey. A journey in which human creativity plays a crucial role, by building and employing in various contexts a metrics of technological and productivity change. It is hard to think of a more exciting and worthwhile topic in applied economics.' About the Author The late Hariolf Grupp, formerly Deputy Director, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (FhG-ISI), Karlsruhe, Germany and Professor, Faculty of Economics and Management, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany and Shlomo Maital, Academic Director, TIM-Tel Aviv, Israel and Senior Researcher, S. Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, Technion, Haifa, Israel