< Back to previous page

Project

Decisions on the secrecy of a new product development process

Consider the situation of a company that wants to develop a new product and launch it onto the market, for example Apple's first iPhone. To this aim, it has to execute certain activities such as writing software, conducting market research or producing and testing a prototype. If these are observed by a competitor (e.g., Samsung) then the latter will probably react, for example by mimicking the innovation which, in turn, might jeopardize the innovator's future profit. To protect its innovation from imitation, Apple kept the details of its iPhone secret during 30 months of development, using false prototypes and disguised software modules in the collaboration with its partners. By doing so, competitors had less time to anticipate Apple's actions, and Apple managed to grasp a leading market share. The goal of the research set out in this proposal is to examine how such secrecy considerations can be generically modelled and incorporated into existing project planning and scheduling frameworks, and we will develop suitable algorithms to produce optimal strategies for those models. These models and algorithms can constitute the basis for deriving managerial guidelines for innovating companies on how to deal with secrecy during their product development process in order to better secure the potential benefits of a new product.

Date:8 Sep 2021 →  12 Sep 2022
Keywords:secrecy
Disciplines:Operations research and mathematical programming
Project type:PhD project