Information security research methodologies: A review

While new product development is considered critical for profitable growth of firms, there are several risks of cannibalization, if not outright disruption of the new product by those of rival firms much before the former comes up with the next generation product. Even otherwise,smart firms tend to prolong the product lifecycle by means of strategies that achieve product variety in terms of aesthetics or incremental innovations or modular variety or variety of customer value propositions in the form of parallel business models. Though there are studies on flexible product development at both intra-firm and inter-firm levels in a spirit of collaboration between partner firms, there is paucity of literature on flexible product development in the context of co-opetition at an industry level. The current study attempts to synthesize various stand-alone perspectives into an integrated framework which can aid the optimal decision-making of firms w.r.t flexible product development initiatives. This is a developmental paper and many of its suggestions require rigorous testing through studies in a wider array of settings. The paper provides a snapshot of various related corporate practices of strategic flexibility in the form of flexible product development adopted by firms across industries and the respective success/failure stories, the lessons of which when learnt properly can go a long way in the strategic self-renewal of many an organization.