Martin Sköld

When an industry is disrupted, the predominant view is that new entrants benefit at the expense of incumbents, who are pictured as slow-moving, inert, and incapable to change. Based on a longitudinal multiple case study with data over a 15-year period, we challenge this view. By studying the action responses of three incumbent firms and three new entrants to a major regulatory change in the life insurance industry, we find that both incumbents and new entrants can succeed if complementary assets are correctly managed. In particular, firms need to acquire and refine certain key assets needed for exploiting new business opportunities and, subsequently, need to enhance the value of their complementary assets by transforming them from generic to specialized and on to co-specialized stages. These findings have theoretical implications for the literature on strategy and innovation management. In addition, we outline important managerial implications to transform complementary assets to stages with higher value.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify areas and issues for management to consider in balancing specialization and commonalization in large manufacturing corporations with multiple brands from a strategic R&D and manufacturing point of view. Design/methodology/approach: Three global manufacturing corporations from the automotive sector are used as a strategic sample composing three sequential clinical research projects. The data come from complementary data-gathering methods combining documents and interviews and workshops with top executives, project leaders, platform managers and product brand managers, thus enabling triangulation. Findings: The study shows that managing manufacturing corporations with multiple brands is not just on a scale between full specialization and full commonalization but instead has its own logic of categorizations and portfolio formations. In order to develop the value of the brand portfolio, management must simultaneously embrace and address a number of highly integrated corporate values and highly differentiated brand company values. Research limitations/implications: This study contributes primarily by relating economy of scale in relation to the need for differentiation of products and brands that have different values, customers and market positions. A model for balancing commonalization and specialization provides several opportunities for further research and development; however, generalizations are issue and context specific. Practical implications: The critical issues in balancing how to deal with specialization and commonalization in a company with multiple brands are explored and summarized in a framework for the practitioner to use in analyzing a real situation. Originality/value: Previous literature focuses on the maximization of synergies within one brand, missing the specific dynamics of large manufacturing corporations with many entities, such as individual products and brands. This paper adds knowledge regarding how to balance synergies from commonalization with important objectives to preserve the specialization and distinctiveness of each product brand.

Open innovation can involve more or less information and knowledge from few or many areas and few or many actors. The communication can also be more or less intense and frequent. These are considered here to be aspects of openness. Patterns of open innovation are often identified primarily in a vertical dimension in relation to various types of suppliers. Vertical 'open' innovation might however also have 'closed' signatures, especially in relations with suppliers owning scarce and specified technology and/or in relations with large suppliers prescribing technological content. Patterns of more or less closed innovation are mainly identified in a horizontal dimension. This type of innovation has closed signatures since the underlying technology being more or less general or specifically applicable is not traded on an open market, but developed for specific purposes between cooperating parties. In summary, attention should be paid to the openness in both vertical and horizontal perspectives.

Purpose
It is argued in this article that too little is known about product platforms and how to deal with them from a manager's point of view. Specifically, little information exists regarding when old established platforms are replaced by new generations in R&D and production environments. To shed light on this unexplored and growing managerial concern, the purpose of this explorative study is to identify operational challenges to management when product platforms are replaced.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a longitudinal field‐study approach. Two companies, Gamma and Omega, fulfilled important sampling criteria and were selected as strategic samples for the study. The two companies were studied for 42 and eight months, respectively, and were chosen for their long and rigorous experiences of platform development. Together with managers from Gamma and Omega, one major platform replacement was chosen in each company.
Findings
The study shows that platform replacements primarily challenge managers' existing knowledge about platform architectures. A distinction can be made between “width” and “height” in platform replacements, and it is crucial that managers observe this in order to challenge their existing knowledge about platform architectures. Issues on technologies, architectures, components and processes as well as on segments, applications and functions are identified.
Practical implications
Practical implications are summarized and discussed in relation to a framework distinguishing between platform replacement “height” and “width”. Seven groups of managerial measures for dealing with the issues are recommended.
Originality/value
The study aims to contribute to the existing literature by taking a managers' perspective of product platform development. Its specific originality and value is achieved by focusing on product platform replacements believed to represent a growing management challenge.

Numerous companies apply product platforms in order to improve their competitiveness due to increasingly challenging market conditions. Product platforms are often motivated by financial goals and a desire to increase commonality in order to achieve economies of scale and scope. However, while a great deal of the previous research describes the benefits of product platforms, the potential drawbacks and disadvantages of commonality are only sporadically covered. The underlying motive for this study is to elaborate on existing knowledge in order to identify areas which deserve particular attention when an organisation is striving for commonality, specifically with regard to components. From an in-depth explorative case study of a major global truck manufacturer, drawbacks are identified and categorised into:
strategic
technical
organisational drawbacks.
Furthermore, this study investigates the ways in which different parts of the organisation are affected by component commonality. Finally, it discusses ways in which the identified drawbacks can be counteracted.

Technology represents the primordial force for companies and organizations in securing long-term competitiveness. In the intensive search to access new technology, organizations are more and more looking beyond the borders of the focal firm and becoming involved in various networks with suppliers, consultants, partners, and others. However, the distinction between the focal firm, on the one hand, and networks, on the other, is in this paper argued to be too extensive without intermediating nuances. Less focus is given to an in-between perspective configured by business groups or concerns here defined as parent corporations with subsidiary companies. It is this perspective of business groups with characteristics between individual firms and open networks that is of interest in this paper. The focus is on manufacturing business groups in which the companies will typically have individual as well as common technologies.

The research aim is to develop a framework to be used as an analytical tool for understanding and organizing technology sharing in manufacturing business groups. The research approach was to study technology sharing in a natural setting combining multiple in-depth sources of evidence in a clinical research setting. A prestudy identified key dimensions in classifying cases leading to four clusters of typified cases. Data were gathered from meetings with 24 managers from various research and development (R&D) units who met regularly every other week during seven months, in-depth interviews, internal documents and protocols, and workshops. Following the clinical field-study approach, findings are theoretically validated in relation to literature. The analysis identifies and depicts four different types of technology-sharing scenarios in manufacturing business groups. Each type has particular characteristics of its own. The four scenarios together provide a synthesized portfolio with different types of dimensions. A first dimension makes a distinction between sharing new technology development versus existing technology. Another distinguishes between technologies aimed at the whole business group and those aimed at specific segments. The two dimensions together comprise four different types of technology-sharing alternatives. Each one of them can be used at the focal firm, and together, they are applicable from a business group perspective comprising technology-sharing portfolios of manufacturing business groups.

Product platforms have become a principal fundament and a prerequisite for profitable product development in almost every industry today. Since platforms have a desirable potential to reduce development and production costs, there is an extensive bulk of knowledge describing underlying platform principles and challenges. But the vast majority of the identified challenges are based on single firms and brand contexts, which imply that previous findings might not be applicable when platform development involves several brands, here called multibranded platforms. In the present article it is therefore suggested that there is lack of knowledge describing managerial challenges of multibranded platform development. To be able to capture such a strategy that holds certain complexity and unknown dimension, an explorative and longitudinal field study is supposed to achieve the finest insights into a yet incompletely documented phenomenon. Because of the field-study approach, findings from the study are theoretically validated in relation to existing knowledge from other contributions. To start developing a multibranded product platform development framework, the present study identifies three distinctively different strategic forces that must be handled in such multibranded platform development: (1) the creation of a common architecture; (2) accomplishing product differentiation within an expanded and multibranded product scope; and (3) corporate responsibility in the transition from single-branded to multibranded platform development. Three dimensions of managerial challenges are identified. The first is technology management challenges, which deal with commonalization in terms of the development of common multibranded architectures. The major challenge to achieve architectural commonalization is that no individuals from any brand have the proper multibranded architectural knowledge. Instead, multibranded architectures must evolve from the beginning and be founded on a new and expanded brand scope. Architectural commonalization also includes elements of unlearning since previous experiences have little relevance. The second challenge is brand management challenges and deals with brand differentiation in terms of portfolio management. Differentiation is an effect of increased diversification that particularly challenges brands of opposite generic competitive strategies. The third challenge dimension is called corporate management challenges and deals with the combination of the two others. From a corporate management perspective, it seems important to provide new organizational structures that support and combine interests of technology and brand management. Finally, multibranded platform development is a corporate strategy that affects business units and functional units thoroughly. © 2007 Product Development & Management Association.