Success in Global New Product Development: Impact of Strategy and the Behavioral Environment of the Firm

Product innovation and the trend toward globalization are two important dimensions driving business today, and a firm's global new product development (NPD) strategy is a primary determinant of performance. Succeeding in this competitive and complex market arena calls for corporate resources and strategies by which firms can effectively tackle the challenges and opportunities associated with international NPD. Based on the resource‐based view (RBV) and the entrepreneurial strategic posture (ESP) literature, the present study develops and tests a model that emphasizes the resources of the firm as primary determinants of competitive advantage and, thus, of superior performance through the strategic initiatives that these enable. In the study, global NPD programs are assessed in terms of three dimensions: (1) the organizational resources or behavioral environment of the firm relevant for international NPD—specifically, the global innovation culture of the firm and senior management involvement in the global NPD effort; (2) the global NPD strategies (i.e., global presence strategy and global product harmonization strategy) chosen for expanding and exploiting opportunities in international markets; and (3) global NPD program performance in terms of shorter‐ and longer‐term outcome measures. These are modeled in antecedent terms, where the impact of the resources on performance is mediated by the NPD strategy of the firm. Based on data from 432 corporate global new product programs (North America and Europe, business‐to‐business, services and goods), a structural model testing for the hypothesized mediation effects was substantially supported. Specifically, having an organizational posture that, at once, values innovation plus globalization, as well as a senior management that is active in and supports the international NPD effort leads to strategic choices that are focused on making the firm truly global in terms of both market coverage and product offering. Further, the two strategies—global presence and global product harmonization—were found to be significant mediators of the firm's behavioral environment in terms of impact on performance of global NPD programs.     

Performance of Global New Product Development Programs: A Resource-Based View

Gaining a competitive edge in today's turbulent business environment calls for a commitment by firms to two highly interrelated strategies: globalization and new product development (NPD). Although much research has focused on how companies achieve NPD success, little of this deals with NPD in the global setting. The authors use resource‐based theory (RBT)—a model emphasizing the resources and capabilities of the firm as primary determinants of competitive advantage—to explain how companies involved in international NPD realize superior performance. The capabilities RBT model is used to test how firms achieve superior performance by deploying organizational capabilities to take advantage of key organizational resources relevant for developing new products for global markets. Specifically, the study evaluates (1) organizational NPD resources (i.e., the firm's global innovation culture, attitude to resource commitment, top‐management involvement, and NPD process formality); (2) NPD process capabilities or routines for identifying and exploiting new product opportunities (i.e., global knowledge integration, NPD homework activities, and launch preparation); and (3) global NPD program performance. Based on data from 387 global NPD programs (North America and Europe, business‐to‐business), a structural model testing for the hypothesized mediation effects of NPD process capabilities on organizational NPD resources was largely supported. The findings indicate that all four resources considered relevant for effective deployment of global NPD process capabilities play a significant role. Specifically, a positive attitude toward resource commitment as well as NPD process formality is essential for the effective deployment of the three NPD process routines linked to achieving superior global NPD program performance; a strong global innovation culture is needed for ensuring effective global knowledge integration; and top‐management involvement plays a key role in deploying both knowledge integration and launch preparation. Of the three NPD process capabilities, global knowledge integration is the most important, whereas homework and launch preparation also play a significant role in bringing about global NPD program success. Tests for partial mediation suggest that too much process formality may be negative and that top‐management involvement requires careful focus.     

Benchmarking the Firm's Critical Success Factors in New Product Development

Managing new product development (NPD) is, to a great extent, a process of separating the winners from the losers. At the project level, tough go/no-go decisions must be made throughout each development effort to ensure that resources are being allocated appropriately. At the company level, benchmarking is helpful for identifying the critical success factors that set the most successful firms apart from their competitors. This company- or macro-level analysis also has the potential for uncovering success factors that are not readily apparent through examination of specific projects. To improve our understanding of the company-level drivers of NPD success, Robert Cooper and Elko Kleinschmidt describe the results of a multi-firm benchmarking study. They propose that a company's overall new product performance depends on the following elements: the NPD process and the specific activities within this process; the organization of the NPD program; the firm's NPD strategy; the firm's culture and climate for innovation; and senior management commitment to NPD. Given the multidimensional nature of NPD performance, the study involves 10 performance measures of a company's new product program: success rate, percent of sales, profitability relative to spending, technical success rating, sales impact, profit impact, success in meeting sales objectives, success in meeting profit objectives, profitability relative to competitors, and overall success. The 10 performance metrics are reduced to two underlying dimensions: program profitability and program impact. These performance factors become theX-and Y-ax.es of a performance map, a visual summary of the relative performance of the 135 companies responding to the survey. The performance map further breaks down the respondents into four groups: solid performers, high-impact technical winners, low-impact performers, and dogs. Again, the objective of this analysis is to determine what separates the solid performers from the companies in the other groups. The analysis identifies nine constructs that drive performance. In rank order of their impact on performance, the main performance drivers that separate the solid performers from the dogs are: a high-quality new product process; a clear, well-communicated new product strategy for the company; adequate resources for new products; senior management commitment to new products; an entrepreneurial climate for product innovation; senior management accountability; strategic focus and synergy (i.e., new products close to the firm's existing markets and leveraging existing technologies); high-quality development teams; and cross-functional teams.     

Firm Characteristics and NPD Program Success: The Significant Influence of Global Discovery Management

Managing new product development (NPD) with a global point of view is argued to be essential in current business more than ever. Accordingly, many firms are trying to revitalize their NPD processes to make them more global. Therefore, examining global NPD management is one of the top priorities for research. While scholars have examined global launch management, there has been scant attention on the direct effect of global discovery management on NPD success. Therefore, this study investigates how a globally managed discovery phase enhances a firm's overall NPD success. Drawing upon the resource‐based view (RBV) and using Kotabe's ( 1990 ) generic model for market success in global competition as the overarching framework, this study examines four drivers of NPD success: global discovery management, the firm's “global footprint,” its inbound knowledge sourcing practices (i.e., “open innovation proclivity”), and nationality of the teams (i.e., “cross‐national global NPD team use”). The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 255 business units from multiple industries, headquartered worldwide, and surveyed during the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). The PLM‐SEM analyses show that, of the four drivers examined, only global discovery management strongly influences a firm's NPD program success. The findings enhance our understanding of the particularities in global NPD. Based on the study's results, suggestions are provided as to how multinationals can leverage their international operations in the course of their front‐end activities.     

Corporate Culture and Commitment: Impact on Performance of International New Product Development Programs

To achieve success in today's competitive environment, firms increasingly must develop new products for international markets. To this end, they must leverage and must coordinate broad creative capabilities and resources, which often are diffused across geographical and cultural boundaries. Recent writings in the globalization and in the new product development (NPD) literatures suggest that certain “softer” dimensions that define the behavioral environment of the firm—that is, the firm's organizational culture and management commitment—can have an important impact on the outcome of these complex and risky endeavors. But what comprises these dimensions and what type of behavioral environment scenario is linked to high performance in the international NPD effort of firms has not been articulated clearly. This research focuses on these softer dimensions, with the objective of understanding and idengifying their specific makeup as well as their relationship to the outcome of international NPD programs. Based on an integration of three literatures—organizational, new product development, and globalization—the present study develops a research instrument, comprising 18 behavioral environment measurement items as well as several outcome measures, that is administered to a broad empirical sample of goods and services firms active in NPD for international markets. Using empirical results from 252 international NPD programs, three key dimensions are idengified: (1) the innovation/globalization culture of the firm; (2) the commitment of sufficient resources to the NPD program; and (3) top management involvement in the international NPD effort. These dimensions are used to derive four clusters of firms, where each grouping represents a distinctly different behavioral environment scenario. In a preliminary analysis, it is ascertained that other aspects of the firm such as “degree of internationalization,” location of the respondent to the NPD center, and other company parameters do not form the basis of cluster membership. By linking measures of performance to the four behavioral clusters, findings are developed that clearly support this study's hypothesis that international NPD outcomes are associated with the softer behavioral environment dimensions. Scenario performance ranges from “very high” to “very low” and appears to be linked clearly to the dimensions studied. The lower‐performing firms tended to emphasize positively only one, or sometimes two, of the three dimensions. The “best performers” were found to be firms with a “positive balanced” approach to international NPD, where all three behavioral environment dimensions are supported strongly. In other words, firms in this scenario have an open and innovative global NPD culture, they ensure that sufficient resources are committed to the NPD program, and their senior managers play an active and involved role in the international NPD effort. Given this evidence of a direct link between behavioral environment and international NPD performance, the present study's findings suggest some important messages for managers charged with the development of new products for international markets.     

An investigation of the use of global, virtual, and colocated new product development teams

This paper presents the results of an investigation of differences between global, virtual and colocated new product development (NPD) teams. Specifically, we examined whether and how these three types of teams differed in terms of usage, challenges, and performance. A survey of PDMA members was undertaken to collect the data. Out of 103 firms participating in the survey, 54 had used or were using global teams for some of their NPD efforts. Overall, we found that the use of global teams in our respondent firms is rapidly increasing. Our respondents indicated that by the year 2001, approximately one out of every five NPD teams in their companies are likely to be global. However, our respondents also expect that their companies will be using multiple types of teams that is, global, virtual, and colocated, to develop their new products. Our findings also suggest that global teams generally face greater behavioral and project management challenges than either colocated or virtual teams. Global team performance is also lower than the performance of virtual or colocated teams. Are these challenges associated with poorer performance? In examining this question, our results suggest that greater project management challenges are associated with lower performance, for all three types of teams. Surprisingly, behavioral challenges were not associated with performance for any team type. Our results suggest that firms face different problems associated with managing each type of NPD team—global, virtual and colocated. To effectively manage each type of team may, in turn, require that companies and their managers employ different solutions to these different problems. Additionally, companies may find that the preparation they provide to their managers and team members to work in these different team environments may also need to be different. Further research is clearly needed to address these managerial implications.     

Examining Proactive Strategic Decision‐Making Flexibility in New Product Development

While strategic flexibility is widely accepted as a prerequisite for a firm's success, its application in strategic decision making to a firm's new product development (NPD) activities is limited to only a few studies. Furthermore, many organizations still have difficulties creating proactive strategic flexibility in their decision‐making processes. Past research studies have largely ignored the relationship between strategic decision‐making flexibility and firms' resources and/or capabilities and success in the context of NPD. This study advances strategic flexibility by adopting the proactive approach of NPD decision‐making flexibility and by examining its role in translating organizational resources and capabilities into NPD success. This study draws upon the resources, capabilities (i.e., flexibility), and performance framework to show how proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility plays a crucial role in developing new products that can create new opportunities and comply with market needs. Therefore, this research aims to (1) develop an operational definition of strategic decision‐making flexibility and (2) propose a framework to understand the drivers and the subsequent new product performance outcomes of strategic decision‐making flexibility. This study adopts the proactive perspective of strategic decision‐making flexibility and defines it as a capability that enables firms to develop NPD strategies to respond to future changes in the environment. The analysis, based on data collected from 103 European firms, shows that that the effects of long‐term orientation, strategic planning, internal commitment, and innovative climate on proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility are significant. The findings indicate specifically the roles of both champions and gatekeepers, who infuse a firm's knowledge with a clear understanding of its resources, constraints, and market needs, thereby enhancing decision makers' motivation to behave proactively to precipitate transformation. The results also reveal a positive association between proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility and NPD performance outcomes. As such, strategic flexibility provides firms with an ability to adapt to changing environments and to create new market opportunities, product, and technological arenas, and to deliver successful new products. When firms open new market, technological, and product arenas, they can easily foresee their new demands and changes and successfully deliver new products, meeting customer needs/demands, and offering benefits such as quality, cost, and timeliness. This study therefore provides a valuable reference point for future research in strategic decision‐making flexibility in NPD.     

Determinants of New Product Development Team Performance: A Meta‐analytic Review

New product development (NPD) has become a critical determinant of firm performance. There is a considerable body of research examining the factors that influence a firm's ability to successfully develop and introduce new products. Vital to this success is the creation and management of NPD teams. While the evidence for the use of NPD teams and the factors that determine their success is accumulating, there is still a lack of clarity on the team‐level variables that are most impactful on NPD success. This meta‐analytic study examines the effects of NPD team characteristics on three different measures of success: effectiveness (market success), efficiency (meeting budgets and schedules), and speed‐to‐market, requiring incorporation of a broader set of team variables than previous studies in order to capture more factors explaining NPD outcomes. Unlike a typical empirical study that considered no more than two team variables to predict NPD performance, this study combines research spanning eight team variables including team input variables (team tenure, functional diversity, team ability, and team leadership) and team process variables (internal and external team communication, group cohesiveness, and goal clarity). Results from 38 studies were aggregated to estimate the meta‐analytic effect sizes for each of the variables. Using the meta‐analytic results, a path analytic model of NPD success was estimated to isolate the unique effects of team characteristics on NPD effectiveness and efficiency. Results indicate that team leadership, team ability, external communication, goal clarity, and group cohesiveness are the critical determinants of NPD team performance. NPD teams with considerable experience and led by a transformational leader are more successful at developing new products. Effective boundary spanning within and outside the organization and a shared understanding of project objectives are paramount to success. Group cohesiveness is also an important predictor of NPD outcomes confirming the importance of esprit de corps within the team. The findings provide product development managers with a blueprint for creating high‐performance NPD teams.     

New Product Development Practices and Early‐Stage Firms: Two In‐Depth Case Studies

New product development practices (NPD) have been well studied for decades in large, established companies. Implementation of best practices such as predevelopment market planning and cross‐functional teams have been positively correlated with product and project success over a variety of measures. However, for small new ventures, field research into ground‐level adoption of NPD practices is lacking. Because of the risks associated with missteps in new product development and the potential for firm failure, understanding NPD within the new venture context is critical. Through in‐depth case research, this paper investigates two successful physical product‐based early‐stage firms' development processes versus large established firm norms. The research focuses on the start‐up adoption of commonly prescribed management processes to improve NPD, such as cross‐functional teams, use of market planning during innovation development, and the use of structured processes to guide the development team. This research has several theoretical implications. The first finding is that in comparing the innovation processes of these firms to large, established firms, the study found several key differences from the large firm paradigm. These differences in development approach from what is prescribed for large, established firms are driven by necessity from a scarcity of resources. These new firms simply did not have the resources (financial or human) to create multi‐ or cross‐functional teams or organizations in the traditional sense for their first product. Use of virtual resources was pervasive. Founders also played multiple roles concurrently in the organization, as opposed to relying on functional departments so common in large firms. The NPD process used by both firms was informal—much more skeletal than commonly recommended structured processes. The data indicated that these firms put less focus on managing the process and more emphasis on managing their goals (the main driver being getting the first product to market). In addition to little or no written procedures being used, development meetings did not run to specific paper‐based deliverables or defined steps. In terms of market and user insight, these activities were primarily performed inside the core team—using methods that again were distinctive in their approach. What drove a project to completion was relying on team experience or a “learn as you go approach.” Again, the driver for this type of truncated market research approach was a lack of resources and need to increase the project's speed‐to‐market. Both firms in our study were highly successful, from not only an NPD efficiency standpoint but also effectiveness. The second broad finding we draw from this work is that there are lessons to be learned from start‐ups for large, established firms seeking ever‐increasing efficiency. We have found that small empowered teams leading projects substantial in scope can be extremely effective when roles are expanded, decision power is ground‐level, and there is little emphasis on defined processes. This exploratory research highlights the unique aspects of NPD within small early‐stage firms, and highlights areas of further research and management implications for both small new ventures and large established firms seeking to increase NPD efficiency and effectiveness.     

New Product Strategy, Structure, Process, and Performance in the Telecommunications Industry

A continuous flow of new products is the lifeblood for firms that hope to remain competitive in high-technology industries such as telecommunications. Faced with rapidly shrinking product life cycles, these firms must aggressively pursue the quest for more effective new product development (NPD). Ongoing success in such industries is dependent on choosing the right mix of new product strategy, organizational structure, and NPD processes. Rather than considering the interrelationships among these success factors, however, most previous studies of NPD have examined these issues individually. This shortcoming is compounded by the fact that past studies of NPD have typically cut across industry lines. Gloria Barczak addresses these problems by proposing that a firm's choice of new product strategy, structure, and process are interrelated, as are the effects of those choices on NPD performance. Because these choices and their effects also may be dependent on the unique characteristics of the industry in which a firm competes, her study focuses exclusively on firms in a specific, high-technology industry, telecommunications. The study finds that no single NPD strategy, in and of itself, stands out as being better than any other for the telecommunications industry. Instead, it appears that a company's focus should be on ensuring the best possible fit between its chosen NPD strategy and its corporate goals and capabilities. In keeping with the current focus on cross-functional teams, the study results indicate that project teams and R&D teams are the most effective means for organizing NPD efforts in the telecommunications industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, R&D teams are more important for first-to-market firms than they are for fast followers and late entrants. An R&D team provides the technical skills necessary for playing the role of pioneer. Regardless of the firm's NPD strategy and structure, the presence of a product champion is an important element in the success of new product efforts. In an era of rapid, technological advances, idea generation and screening efforts are essential to the success of telecommunications firms. To ensure that they do not fall into the trap of introducing technology for technology's sake, pioneering and fast-follower firms in particular must recognize the importance of staying in touch with their markets. Such market-oriented activities as customer prototype testing and concept definition and testing can help these firms ensure that their technological developments are in line with customer needs and requirements.     

Can You Hear Me Now? Communication in Virtual Product Development Teams*

Globalization and technological advances are driving organizations to extend the boundaries of new product development (NPD) teams from traditional colocated settings to dispersed or virtual settings. Virtual NPD teams have a wide array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) at their disposal. ICTs allow team members to communicate and collaborate as they cope with the opportunities and challenges of cross‐boundary work. The purpose of this paper is to explore ICT use by members of virtual NPD teams. This study presents an exploratory test and integration of two competing perspectives of media use in virtual teams: media capacity theories and social dynamic media theories. Specifically, this paper examines the role of task type, organizational context, and ICT type as critical contingency variables affecting ICT use. It also examines how different patterns of ICT use relate to individual perceptions of team performance. The findings from this study of 184 members of virtual NPD teams in three global firms suggest that communication via ICTs in virtual NPD teams is contingent on a range of factors.     

Who Knows What in NPD Teams: Communication Context,Mode, and Task Contingencies

The use of cross‐functional teams in new product development (NPD) benefits firms in many ways. One benefit is the diverse knowledge team members bring to the project, but that benefit can only be appreciated if team members fully utilize and integrate the differentiated expertise of members. As reliance on cross‐functional NPD teams grows, however, firms struggle to exploit the full potential of functionally diverse groups, the biggest obstacle being integrating team members' varied knowledge, expertise, and abilities. Therefore, understanding how information is integrated and used is a primary concern for both practitioners and researchers. Databases and other forms of hard data are methods team members can use to effectively share and integrate knowledge; another method based on social cognition is transactive memory systems (TMS). TMS indicates who will learn what and from whom. The notion is that knowledge is distributed among people in the group, and to make effective use of it, individuals need to know who knows what and who knows who knows what. Grounded in the knowledge‐based theory of the firm, this study investigates the influence of different communication contexts and modes on TMS under different NPD task environments (i.e., exploitation and exploration) in cross‐functional NPD teams. A theoretical model is developed and empirically tested using data collected from 272 ongoing NPD teams of 128 Chinese high‐tech companies. Findings suggest that when teams face tasks defined by exploration, informal communication and face‐to‐face communication are positively associated with TMS, whereas for tasks defined by exploitation, formal communication and computer‐mediated communication are positively related with TMS. Additionally, this study found that TMS is positively related to NPD performance both in terms of project performance and in terms of market performance. Based on these findings, theoretical and managerial implications are drawn regarding resource deployment that encourages the development of effective TMS leading to successful NPD projects.     

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Performance: Drawing Attention to the Senior Team

Prior studies have argued entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. This study aims to assess how senior team attributes moderate the relationship between EO and firm performance. For this purpose, an attention‐based perspective is adopted, focusing on attention scope as well as distributed and situated attention. By considering the role of senior team heterogeneity in broadening the attention scope of senior teams and the role of senior team shared vision in aligning distributed attention across organizational functions, this research investigates how senior teams may enhance the value‐creating potential of EO. In addition, we assess situated attention by including the notion of environmental dynamism and examining whether the role of the senior team attributes is contingent upon environmental conditions. Using a time‐lagged sample of 346 firms operating in various industries, we find that senior team heterogeneity helps firms to leverage their EO and improve their performance. Moreover, once environmental conditions are taken into account, results indicate that the absence of heterogeneity at senior team level may be particularly detrimental for firms operating in stable environments. The direct moderating effect of shared vision on the relationship between EO and performance is not substantiated. However, senior team shared vision has a positive impact for firms operating in dynamic environments, providing a premium for firms aiming to realize the inherent value of EO. Our research provides important implications for senior teams aiming to leverage their EO into increased firm performance. Evidence shows that while a heterogeneous team composition and senior team shared vision may provide several benefits, these advantages may fluctuate across environmental conditions.     

Systematic Design Methods and the Creative Performance of New Product Teams: Do They Contradict or Complement Each Other?

Can organizations exert control and provide structure for NPD activities while at the same time encouraging and managing creative performance? Any new product development (NPD) project requires some level of creative effort. In new product development, creative performance is of preeminent importance. Most NPD projects are executed with the NPD team as the organizational nucleus. As a result, managing creativity in NPD thus implies managing the creativity of NPD teams. Besides having to manage creative performance, companies are generally also concerned with improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the NPD process. Modern NPD projects therefore have the need for an approach that can be planned, optimized, and verified. As a consequence, systematic design methods have become widely used in NPD. In this article conceptual model is developed of the effect of modern design methodology on the creative performance of NPD teams. First, it is argued that the effect of systematic design methodology on NPD team creativity is mediated by the communication patterns of the NPD team. It is then proposed that four principles underlie modern design methodology: hierarchical decomposition, systematic variation, satisficing, and discursiveness. These principles affect NPD communication by, respectively, influencing the establishment of subgroups, the frequency of communication, the level of agreement or disagreement in the team, and the level of centralization of communication. Next, arguments are presented of how each of these four communicational characteristics shapes the creative performance of NPD teams. This second part of the conceptual model is tested empirically. This is done by studying the communication patterns in 44 NPD teams, employing social network analysis tools. These patterns of communication are then related to team‐level creative performance through a set of regression analyses. The main conclusion of the article is that the design principles work together and need to be considered as an integrated whole: the creative performance of NPD teams can only effectively be managed by using and aligning all four of them.     

When do we really need interpersonal trust in globally dispersed new product development teams?

Interpersonal trust refers to the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to the actions of another party. Trust is generally acknowledged as fostering knowledge exchange and thus contributing to new product development (NPD) team effectiveness. However, the conditions under which NPD teams come to rely more heavily on trust to facilitate effectiveness remain unclear. With burgeoning global collaboration on new product development, we analyze how the characteristics of global NPD teams, i.e., geographic dispersion, computer‐mediated communication (e.g., e‐mail, video‐conferencing), team membership flexibility, and national diversity moderate the trust–effectiveness relationship. Our results show that trust is more important under the condition of geographic dispersion, computer‐mediated communication, and national diversity. By specifying when trust influences NPD team effectiveness in globally dispersed teams, we discuss the theoretical implications and provide recommendations for management.     

Enhancing the Creative Performance of New Product Teams: An Organizational Configurational Approach

Innovation is crucial to managing ever‐increasing environmental complexity. Creativity is the first stage of the innovation process and is particularly relevant in modern new product development (NPD) projects. In response to a call for further empirical research on collective creative performance combining individual and team levels in a comprehensive framework, this paper offers useful evidence for the design of NPD teams to foster creative performance. The results suggest that different sets of individual traits and collective processes combine and interact, enabling a similar level of creative performance from different configurations of individual and team “ingredients.” There are no consistently good‐quality or poor‐quality NPD teams or processes. However, equifinal configurations—based on team composition, and interpersonal, coordination, control, and diversity management processes—can be effective in producing creative products. Through a large‐scale study of 119 teams of students involved in an NPD activity, this paper contributes by expanding creativity and NPD team design literature, providing the basis for a “first right” approach to real‐world, in‐company research. It first proposes and tests the adoption of the configurational equifinality approach in the NPD team design domain, introducing the concept of complementarities among different types of “team ingredients,” both at the individual and team level. Second, it introduces different multidimensional measures of team creative performance, relevant to generalizing and comparing the research results. Third, it offers several guidelines for designing real‐world NPD teams through the combination of diversity and interpersonal management, as well as coordination and control processes, which have not been studied to any great extent but are at times controversial in creativity literature.     

Top Management Compositional Effects on Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Moderating Role of Perceived Technological Uncertainty

Because corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is central to firms' ability to compete, adapt, and perform in increasingly turbulent environments, there is a great interest in understanding its origins. To date, prior studies have overwhelmingly focused on the architectural factors—the structures, cultures, resources, and incentives—that shape entrepreneurial processes within organizations and the environmental conditions that stimulate entrepreneurial activity. However, some researchers have recently begun to argue that the requirements and challenges of CE fall most saliently on the shoulders of the firm's top management team. Focusing on various aspects of top managers' activities, roles, and processes, this line of research demonstrates the enabling role of top management teams in their firm's pursuit of CE. We extend this research by examining the impact of top management team composition in terms of human capital and social capital on CE. Additionally, because external environment perceptions within top teams shape their sociopolitical process and framing of the issues facing their firms, we submit that a team's level of perceived technological uncertainty moderates the impact of the team's human and social capital on CE. We find support for these arguments using multisource data from a sample of 99 high‐technology firms. The discussion finally traces the implications of our theory and findings for research and managerial understanding on CE.     

Resource Dedication and New Product Performance: A Resource‐Based View

Corporate investments in new product development (NPD) initiatives are strategically effective activities that are instrumental in contributing to new product performance. Given that a fundamental nature of product development is the ability to exploit new product opportunities, the authors investigate the firm‐level impact that corporate investments in knowledge workers and financial NPD resources have on new product performance. They track the resource dedication and new product financial performance of 41 firms over a seven‐year period. Our results provide evidence that financial investments have a contemporaneous return on investment while knowledge worker investments provide companies with both contemporaneous and carryover returns. When formulating strategy and making NPD resource allocation decisions, managers must remain cognizant of the time‐dependent nature of resource investments, the need for persistent investment, and the resulting performance impact.     

Innovation Field Orientation and Its Effect on Innovativeness and Firm Performance

New product development (NPD) has become a prime source for gaining a competitive edge in the market. Although a large body of research has addressed the question of how to successfully manage individual innovation projects, the management of a firm's new product portfolio has received comparably less research attention. A phenomenon that has recently emerged on the research agenda is innovation field orientation. Such orientation is understood as the deliberate setup and management of multiple thematically related NPD projects. However, the facets and effects of innovation field orientation are still unexplored. In particular, this study is interested in (1) developing a concept of innovation field orientation, (2) investigating the extent to which innovation field orientation is an established part of the corporate strategic planning practice, and (3) assessing the direct and indirect performance effects of innovation field orientation. For the empirical analysis, data were collected through a mail survey and document analyses from 122 publicly listed firms. Tobin's q was used as an objective performance metric directly related to shareholder value. The results confirm that innovation field orientation is a phenomenon that prevails in practice. In addition, all defining aspects of this orientation have either direct or indirect effects on firm performance. Hence, those firms that deliberately specify and manage innovation fields have a more innovative product portfolio and are more successful than others. Specifically, the findings underline the performance relevance of formally framing innovation fields and assigning a critical mass of resources to them. In addition, empirical support is lent to the suggestion that innovation field orientation has strong indirect performance effects mediated by the innovativeness of the firm's new product portfolio. This implies that firms that deliberately specify focus areas, assign resources to, provide organizational framing for, and stimulate synergies between related NPD projects stand a better chance to achieve a more innovative new product portfolio. This again is highly appreciated by investors and results in a superior stock market evaluation of these firms.     

Managers' conservatism and corporate performance

This article argues that conservatism as a personal value among senior managers significantly affects corporate performance. A scale to measure conservatism was developed and its measurement properties were tested on several hundred executives. Empirical results were consistent with the hypotheses that conservatism among senior management teams is negatively associated with the firm's social responsiveness as well as certain aspects of financial performance.