Managing learning resources for consecutive product generations
In this paper, the authors study how a firm should allocate its learning resources when it is concurrently producing two consecutive generations of one product. They define learning resources as scarce firm-specific resources that a firm allocates towards the improvement of the cost, quality, or timeliness of its existing products and processes. They use empirically tested models for demand substitution and learning curves to formulate this problem and they present their results as propositions in regard to the optimal time at which a firm should direct all its learning resources to the newer product generation, depending on the substitution rate of the two product generations, the learning rate, and the level of cross-learning.
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http://flora.insead.edu/fichiersti_wp/inseadwp2002/2002-75.pdf
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