Call for papers: "Emerging Trends in Product Development and Innovation Management"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Product Development.

This special issue will aim to provide a complete overview of innovative practical and methodological approaches for product development and innovation management. This encompasses the analysis of emerging paradigms, the description of their benefits and the identification of the enabling drivers. Various paradigms (such as Mass Customisation, Circular Economy, Open Innovation, Smart Objects, Servitisation, etc.) are retaining an increasing interest from both scientists and practitioners, thus deserving a better analysis of their widespread application.

Nowadays, in several consumer sectors, product development involves stronger and more complex interactions with end users in order to provide effective co-creation and co-design approaches as well as to elicit users’ requirements from the analysis and integration of many unstructured and heterogeneous sources of information. Big Data analysis and high-performance computing as well as collaborative platforms are important tools for increasing users’ involvement in co-design approaches.

A long lasting relationship between users and producers is also fostered by the development of Smart Objects that require the redefinition of business models.

Intelligent Autonomous Systems and Agents support the whole product lifecycle, on the one hand directly interacting with the end users for satisfying their needs and on the other hand with value chain operators in order to enhance design and production agility and efficiency.

The development of the emerging trends is enabled by the interplay of technological, methodological and organisational innovations.

Innovation management and collaborative product development require the establishment of global value chains using collaborative practices, which foster the involvement of all the stakeholders. New collaborative models, especially those strongly involving the end users, as well as the development of software platforms supporting them are another interesting research subject covered in this special issue.

Finally, it will be addressed the role of Decision Support Tools (DSTs) that, in such dynamic and complex contexts, play an important role in all the phases of product development and innovation management. For instance, DSTs can be used for optimising the configuration of distributed and collaborative value chains, as well as for transforming the voice of customer(s) into specific product features.

We invite conceptual, methodological, and empirical papers using wide-range approaches, research results submitted should explicitly address at least one of main research streams outlined above and comprehensive approaches will be favoured considering the holistic focus of the special issue. Considering that both theoretical and empirical aspects are addressed by this special issue, its contents are suitable for practitioners involved in all the various steps of new product development and innovation management as well as to scientific researchers focusing on specific aspects of such processes.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the 23^rd ICE/IEEE International Technology Management Conference (ICE/IEEE ITMC 2017), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel approaches, frameworks and paradigms for innovation
• Best practices in innovation management for product, service, process and business models
• Collaborative innovation and living-labs
• Open innovation networks and ecosystems
• Value co-creation and co-innovation strategies
• User-driven innovation and user co-creation
• New business models for mass-customised products and services
• Circular economy
• Industrial product service systems
• Global value chain design and management
• Collaborative and networked factories
• Optimization-based decision support models
• Open data and big data for social change
• Lean business models
• Social value of new product and service development
• Use of social media in new product development

Important Dates

Manuscripts due by: 15 October, 2017
Notification to authors: 15 December, 2017
Final versions due by: 15 February, 2018