This research explores the acquisition of customer input and its importance in the development of very new products. Data were gathered on 55 product development projects from the computer telephony integration industry – a new industry experiencing rapid technological change. The data were used to test hypotheses concerning the relationships between product newness, the importance of customer input in the development process, and the use of customer intensive market research methods. We found that the importance of customer input increases with market newness of a product up to a point and then drops off for very new products, whereas the importance of customer input increases with technological newness of a product without dropping off. We also found that the importance of customer input significantly increases the use of customer intensive market research methods; whereas, neither market nor technological product newness in themselves had much direct effect on research methods.

The paper uses object based models to capture and make visible the system level coordination structure of complex projects. These models facilitate the development of a shared view necessary for effective project management. In the paper, development and use of the models are illustrated using examples drawn from the design of custom silicon. We examine three custom silicon design projects to identify the significant coordination problems encountered as well as the difficulties of using activity based project management tools. Then we develop object based models of coordination structure as a tool to overcome these difficulties. We use these models to capture a project manager's view of the four stages of the custom silicon design cycle: design definition, chip design, prototype manufacture, and system integration. We conclude by discussing the relationship between the coordination structure approach and other project management tools, and the managerial advantages of the proposed approach in the management of projects. Because of their simplicity and stability, coordination structure models form a useful front-end for conventional activity based project management. The approach has particular value for the management of projects in which the task structure is complex, uncertain and unstable, as is typically the case in new product development.

Most user authentication methods and identity proving systems rely on a centralized database. Such information storage presents a single point of compromise from a security perspective. If this system is compromised it poses a direct threat to users digital identities. This paper proposes a decentralized authentication method, called the Horcrux 1 protocol, in which there is no such single point of compromise. The protocol relies on decentralized identifiers (DIDs) under development by the W3C Verifiable Claims Community Group and the concept of selfsovereign identity. To accomplish this, we propose specification and implementation of a decentralized biometric credential storage option via blockchains using DIDs and DID documents within the IEEE 2410-2017 Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS).

Model checking is shown to be an effective tool in validating the behavior of a fault tolerant embedded spacecraft controller. The case study presented here shows that by judiciously abstracting away extraneous complexity, the state space of the model could be exhaustively searched allowing critical functional requirements to be validated down to the design level. Abstracting away detail not germane to the problem of interest leaves by definition a partial specification behind. The success of this procedure shows that it is feasible to effectively validate a partial specification with this technique. Three anomalies were found in the system. One was an error in the detailed requirements, and the other two were missing/ambiguous requirements. Because the method allows validation of partial specifications, it is also an effective approach for maintaining fidelity between a co-evolving specification and an implementation.

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