Research Hotspots and Frontiers of Product R&D Management
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applied sciences Article Research Hotspots and Frontiers of Product R&D Management under the Background of the Digital Intelligence Era—Bibliometrics Based on Citespace and Histcite Hongda Liu 1,2, Yuxi Luo 2, Jiejun Geng 3 and Pinbo Yao 2,* 1 School of Economics & Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China; [email protected] or [email protected] 2 School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China; [email protected] 3 School of Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai 200333, China; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: The rise of “cloud-computing, mobile-Internet, Internet of things, big-data, and smart-data” digital technology has brought a subversive revolution to enterprises and consumers’ traditional patterns. Product research and development has become the main battlefield of enterprise compe- Citation: Liu, H.; Luo, Y.; Geng, J.; tition, facing an environment where challenges and opportunities coexist. Regarding the concepts Yao, P. Research Hotspots and and methods of product R&D projects, the domestic start was later than the international ones, and Frontiers of Product R&D many domestic companies have also used successful foreign cases as benchmarks to innovate their Management under the Background management methods in practice. “Workers must first sharpen their tools if they want to do their of the Digital Intelligence jobs well”. This article will start from the relevant concepts of product R&D projects and summarize Era—Bibliometrics Based on current R&D management ideas and methods. We combined the bibliometric analysis software Citespace and Histcite. Appl. Sci. Histcite and Citespace to sort out the content of domestic and foreign literature and explore the 2021, 11, 6759. https://doi.org/ changing trends of research hotspots. Finally, combined with the analysis of confirmed cases in 10.3390/app11156759 domestic masters and doctoral dissertations to test the theory, the literature review of the product R&D project management theme was carried out from the dual perspectives of comprehensive theory Academic Editors: Carsten Felden, and practice. This study uses the core collection library of Web of Science as the object of document Nicola Castellano, Henning Baars, extraction. Based on the search conditions of “Product development” or “Intergrat* product develop- Bruno Maria Franceschetti, Michiyasu Nakajima, ment”, 8998 sample documents were initially retrieved. The search deadline was June 2019, with Fanny-Eve Bordeleau and a time range from 2000 to June 2019. Then, using the record number of 50 as the critical condition, Trinks Sebastian 5007 analysis samples were deleted, refined, and cleaned. Through the review and measurement of 5007 papers, the analysis showed that: (1) in the last ten years, sustainability, consumer focus, Received: 20 March 2021 new approaches to product development management, and organizational design have become Accepted: 21 July 2021 critical considerations in the product development process stage; (2) at this stage, researchers are Published: 23 July 2021 paying more attention to the innovation, design, product development, identification, simultaneous engineering, consequence, and stage/gate model aspects of product development; and (3) factors Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral such as long development cycles, high costs, and poor organizational design are now common with regard to jurisdictional claims in problems in the product development process. published maps and institutional affil- iations. Keywords: digital intelligence era; product R&D management; document metrology; informetrics; scientometrics; Web of Science Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. 1. Introduction This article is an open access article In the context of globalization, the era of the digital economy, marked by digitization, distributed under the terms and networking, and intelligence, has come. With the acceleration of the iterative speed of conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// the competitive market, the rapid changes in technology, and the transformation of the creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ role of consumers to “value co-creators”, the logic-oriented business model of production 4.0/). has gradually exposed the disadvantages of its disconnect from the market. In the face of Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 6759. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11156759 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 6759 2 of 25 market and technological uncertainty, continuous innovation and in-depth research and development have become important ways for companies to build their core competitive advantages. In the 2019 report “New Economic Species: Practice and Innovation of Chinese Enterprises”, released by the China Development Model Research Center of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, it mentioned that in “the new era of competition, research and development capabilities are the foundation. Technological advancements such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will test the ability of enterprises to experience innovative products”. It can be seen that from R&D to production, sales to service, users to data, and facing the future, companies with collaborative development networks will become development managers of global companies. Cooper [1] pointed out that new product development is an essential driving fac- tor for gaining competitive advantage in early research. According to statistics [2], in the mid-1980s, new products only represented about 33% of the company’s sales and 22% of the profits. However, in modern enterprises, these two indicators’ values have increased significantly, reaching 60% and 50%, respectively. Therefore, today’s successful companies are often able to continue to launch high-quality new products. For example, Huawei’s number of patent authorizations in 2019 ranked first in China. The new products launched during the same period were also well received in the market, which fully reflects Huawei’s strong technical research development capabilities and new product develop- ment capabilities. With the acceleration of the company’s product diversification and market globalization, an increasing number of companies have realized that new product development and management capabilities are essential for companies to enhance their core competitiveness. In a limited time, continued development of new products with better quality, better prices, and more powerful functions are needed to occupy a leading position and dominant advantage in the market [3]. However, due to the corporate product development system’s insufficiency, many companies lost 46% of their resources in the process of new product development, and the success rate was less than 15%. Among them, more than 60% of CEOs were dissatisfied with the performance of new product development. This shows that most companies have weak independent R&D capabilities and low R&D efficiency. Therefore, it is particularly urgent to reform the product R&D management system [4]. Product development has become the main battlefield of indus- trial competition since the 1990s. Since then, domestic and foreign scholars have carried out research on the concepts, goals, processes, organizational structure, and performance evaluation of product development one by one, constantly proposing new management methods, and optimizing theoretical models in combination with practice. In the book “The Power of Pace”, the author discussed how to improve R&D performance and forge the core competitiveness of enterprises in the field of product development via the product and cycle-time excellence method (PACE). The idea of integrated product development (IPD) also originated from this. Subsequently, the practice of IBM, which greatly shortened the time to market, improved the efficiency of product development, and increased the profit of the product, has become a recognized high-efficiency product development model. How- ever, few scholars have systematically analyzed and summarized product development project management and have not explored the changing patterns of the theoretical basis and product development direction. Using Histcite and Citespace software, a scientific and predictive tool based on instrumental analysis, it is possible to summarize and predict the topical trends of existing research on product development and future evolution. This paper, therefore, introduces the concepts of product development and project management, and performs a review of research, using bibliometric methods to explore the evolutionary logic of product development and provide suggestions for an optimized path for product development management in companies. Firstly, based on Histcite software, the article provides a statistical overview of research related to product development and explores the changing situation from the formation of product development management to the diversity of product development directions. Secondly, based on the Citespace software, statistics on research themes and hotspots in product development were conducted to Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 26 Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 6759 3 of 25 uct development management to the diversity of product development directions. Sec- ondly, based on the Citespace software, statistics on research themes and hotspots in product development were conducted to analyze the evolution pattern of research themes.analyze Finally, the evolution a practical