Research Questions - Nicolas Hatzfeld

The Challenges of Industrial Strategy.

The text by Gilles Garel (Centre de Recherche en Gestion de l'Ecole Polytechnique) which was distributed at the opening of the meeting, gave only an imperfect account of his research. The research focused on the Stamping Department at Renault and its suppliers from 1991 to 1993, on the lengths of projects and on the factors likely to shorten these. This issue, which has become very significant since the end of the 1980s, has given rise to discussion at GERPISA, based particularly on the work of Geraldine de Bonnafos, Christophe Midler, and Jean-Claude Moisdon and Benoit Weil.

Three types of factors may influence the shortening of project length; economic, organizational and cognitive, which are interdependent. Hence, it is the existence of concurrent processes and projects which render credible an economic pressure to anticipate the detection of problems. Moreover, such organization into projects greatly favours communication between experts in different fields, as well as compromises: the meeting, focused on something material (mock-up, sketch etc.) aids in overcoming some of the difficulties that each participant faces in justifying his own know-how: what Garel calls the "silence of the artist".

Two topics which were briefly touched on during the meeting were as follows:

On the one hand, there is a return to research into the organizational forms taken by product "development". A typology reveals three major models: sequential organization, which was traditional until recently; concurrent organization, which is being developed in both Europe and the United States; and the quasi-integrated organization of Japanese manufacturers. Information concerning the last remains limited. Toolmakers are affiliates, and seem to have a sequential type of relationship with the Japanese vehicle manufacturers. However, the distribution of know-how is clearly different; the vehicle manufacturers know how to resolve the problems of ensuring feasibility upstream of their toolmakers, and problems of adaptation downstream. With the current state of our knowledge, it is difficult to discern what is a general characteristic of Japanese firms from what is a deliberate strategy in managing projects. Hence, if Japanese toolmakers work in this way with their parent company, they must learn about concurrent development when working with Western firms.

If since the mid 1980s the tendency in Europe has been to emphasize the transversal, research has recently started to focus on the blockages or excesses associated with such reasoning (for example attention has been drawn to craft-based know-how, which endangered an overly systematic project-based logic), and research seeks to re-orient crafts as a function of what has been learned from projects. Does this represent an inevitable balance between the two sorts of logic?

On the other hand, the cognitive factor requires particular attention. This involves taking account of: the diversity of know-how, whether technical, concerning evaluation, relational, concerning interfacing; the dual nature of design which recombines existing types of knowledge and invents new knowledge; certain impacts due to Renault's externalization of part of its toolmaking activities and therefore its expertise (several of the actors who had been collaborating in the same factory area are now dispersed into the suppliers, and must acquire new know-how in order to regain previous levels of efficiency). Generally speaking, the claims of concurrent development have not been realized. However, significant achievements have been made in terms of quality and lead times (in this regard another look at current points of reference would be desirable) notably, and reverting to the previous ways would be risky, particularly if it questioned the learning process currently under way. One of the challenges is to develop knowledge as far upstream as possible, at the start of the project's trajectory.

In studying the product strategies of firms in terms of (product) style, Jean-Marc Pointet has examined the interplay of two contradictory factors in the determination of these strategies, mimetism and differentiation, in other words the capacity or the refusal to integrate the characteristics of competing products. More broadly, this opposing pair contributes to the representation of the market and its tendencies, for instance through the dual tendency by which (a) leading firms widen the characteristics-space of a product, and (b) competitors and imitators saturate this space.

Pointet interprets the development of power relationships at the level of the market, between mimetism and differentiation, as the expression of a cyclical development of this economic sector. To summarize, the 1980s witnessed the supremacy of mimetic behaviour which reflected the maturity of this industry; in contrast the contemporary period, introduced by structural changes (globalization, new competitors, tendency towards European integration, growing opacity of consumer requirements, revamping of production organization) is said to be marked by a renewal of differentiation procedures amongst manufacturers which is said to express a phase of renaissance. Hence the strategies of constructing markets by supplying strongly differentiated products in the current period in which uncertainties have increased.

This analysis requires that we define the criteria for difference and replacement separately of the internal and external communications activities of firms (without which our reasoning would be constrained within a formalist loop). Moreover, it raises other questions: for one, what are the criteria to judge the success of a differentiated product (image, sales, profitability), and secondly, who benefits and what conditions are attached (does the manufacturer benefit from this product, or from later products, or is it the competitors which imitate the product)? Lastly, it opens up other avenues for research: is there in this field of innovation or imitation a link between the forms of production organization and types of product? Or rather, how are the strategic choices of manufacturers determined by their apparatus for perceiving and interpreting the market?