The purpose of this paper is to clarify the process of the generation, transformation, and succession of knowledge in practice using product genealogy. We investigated the development process of product X, which was developed over 27 years at a research and development (R&D) center of company α. We adopted emergent business field research, in which a practitioner becomes a researcher and investigates his own business field. We also analyzed using the conceptual frameworks of communities of practice and boundary objects. As a result, we found the succeeded explicit knowledge and the knowledge remained in practice and presented the characteristics of knowledge in practice during the development process related to product X.

For sellers of electronic components, it is expected to introduce simulation into pricing operations to maximize profits. We propose that a model is expected to be consistent with the mechanism for generating the price-cumulative sales volume distribution derived from sales data. The model suggests that the price-cumulative volume distribution generates a log-normal distribution at high gross margins, and the power distribution is generated as the gross margin declines, and the absolute value of the exponent of the power distribution increases with a smaller gross margin at the launch of a new product. By simulating the starting price and cost of individual products, the model provides not only the price-cumulative sales volume distribution but also the future evolution of the relationship between the average price, the distribution and the gross margin. Therefore, we believe that this approach is effective in realizing simulation application to new product design and pricing work.