Tanawat Hirunyawipada

A paper by an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Victoria designed to help businesses improve the processes they use to create new products recently was accepted for publication in a popular journal.

Tanawat Hirunyawipada’s article, “Cross-Functional Integration and the Knowledge Transformation Mechanism: Implications for New Product Development,” will be published in the journal Industrial Marketing Management later this year. An exact date for publication hasn’t yet been set.

Cross-functional integration brings together experts from many fields, including marketing and engineering, to develop new products or services for a firm, Hirunyawipada said. The process of bringing different experts together has been identified as one of the best ways to successfully bring a product to the market.

However, if such groups only work together on a level that creates general information, the new product or service can be copied easily by competitors. Groups instead seek to create concepts and knowledge that isn’t so easy to reproduce, he said.

While the creation of so-called “implicit knowledge” can’t really be managed, Hirunyawipada identified certain factors that can be accentuated. This can lead to a social environment and group cohesion that better facilitates the creation of the team’s implicit knowledge, he said.

“Creating new knowledge is one of the great traditions in academia,” said Farhang Niroomand, dean of the UHV School of Business Administration. “Scholarly work like the topic covered in this article can directly be applied by the reader, which makes it exceptionally valuable to a great number of people. That value, in turn, brings honor and prestige to our school and university.”

Industrial Marketing Management, published by internationally-based Elsevier, provides in-depth case studies geared to the needs of marketing managers, executives and professors, according to the company’s Web site. An editorial review board of leading international scholars and practitioners assures a balance of theory and practical applications in all articles.