One of the greastest challenges facing industry in the new century will be the process of selecting which new products to develop. Capital resources and manpower are limited. Stakeholders are demanding ever-increasing rates of return. These problems are especially difficult in highly regulated industries such as the chemicals and life sciences businesses, where development times are long and costly. In formative industries such as biotechnology, regulatory requirements continue to tighten, as public perception is often more influential than science in the approval process. Engineers are comfortable building process models. However, they infrequently think about the development of new products or the selection of new products as processes. This study is an attempt to get the engineers, involved in the new product decision making process. Using the pharmaceutical industry as an example, probabilistic network models are used to capture all the activities and resources required in the ‘process’ of developing a new drug. The data representing each new product candidate are then combined into a simulation model of the new product development pipeline. This simulation model can be used by management to obtain insights into a new product portfolio, which will provide high rates of return at an acceptable level of exposure to risk for the corporation.

This paper discusses the results of a survey designed to examine the level of assertiveness of team members and the impact of that level of assertiveness. The survey was administered over two semesters to student teams working on a group project In an Organizational Behavior course in the School of Technology at Purdue University. The survey focused on assertiveness in team Interactions with special attention given to gender differences. Survey results from the first semester indicated that female students need to be more assertive in team interactions, but, In general, they did not recognize this need. The survey indicated males also lack appropriate levels of assertiveness, but they were more accurate in recognizing this shortcoming. Only a small percentage of team members were considered too assertive, and female students were much more likely to be criticized for this behavior than were males. After describing the initial survey results to students enrolled In the same course the following semester, the survey was repeated. Second-semester results showed that the self-appraisal by women improved and women were no longer disproportionately considered too assertive, but the students still did not improve on exhibiting the proper level of assertiveness.

The authors conducted a series of structured interviews with managers of ten supermarket chains in Shanghai to compare supermarket business practices in Shanghai with those in the United States, emphasizing logistics management issues. Shanghai supermar- kets tend to be smaller than U.S. stores, but the store layout and product selection are similar in both countries. While the Shanghai supermar- kets have modern scanning equipment, they do little quantitative sales or inventory analysis.