Abstract for: An Integrated Decision Support System Regarding Interdependencies Between Time-to-Market and Market Diffusion under Competition

Industry faces fundamental challenges as new competitors from emerging countries enter markets. Thus, competition increases and time-to- market as intermediate span between R&D and series production gets more important. Additionally, customers ask for more individualized products. However, the resulting increase in product variety leads to rising complexity and costs and thereby, limited resources have to be allocated to a multitude of parallel product development projects. To tackle these challenges and stay successful, companies aim at decreasing time-to-market with constant or even lower resource input. While complexity management and resource allocation have extensively been discussed for R&D and series production, ap-proaches for the time-to-market phase are still scarce. Against this background, we aim at analyzing the interrelations between time-to-market and resource allocation in a competitive environment with a decision support system. To reach this aim, we present a system-dynamics model analyzing the market diffusion of a product. Thereby, we are able to derive information on interdependencies between resource input and time-to-market depending on competitors’ behavior. We apply the model to the gas turbine industry merging recent data from literature with information gathered in expert interviews. Results are presented highlighting the interdependencies between resources and time-to-market for the gas turbine market.