New Product Development Performance and the Interaction of Cross-Functional Integration and Knowledge Management

Previous research on cross-functional integration between research and development (R&D) and marketing has focused on the development of appropriate structural modes and levels of integration and cooperation across the R&D–marketing interface. A gap in the previous research in this area has been the failure to investigate the integration of information from past related product development projects (i.e., knowledge management). In this investigation of R&D–marketing integration, variables from the emerging research literature on organizational learning and knowledge management are examined. By simultaneously investigating the effects of knowledge management variables and R&D–marketing integration, this gap in the literature is addressed. The results demonstrate that the combined effects of R&D–marketing integration and knowledge management in the form of recording, retrieving, and reviewing information from past projects results in interaction effects. In 8 of 18 tests interactions were found. In 6 of 18 tests these resulted in the form of amplification effects with dependent variables such as product prototype development proficiency, product launch proficiency, technological core competency fit, and design change frequency.     

浅析高绩效项目团队的开发和建设

经济全球化发展推动了企业内外部经营环境的快速变化,企业面临的竞争压力也是空前的严峻。在激烈的市场竞争和组织变革中,企业要想在生存与发展的基础上做强做大,在准确战略定位的同时,打造与其相适应的高绩效的团队显得尤为重要。为适应现代企业的高效率要求,高绩效团队的建立也就应运而生。现在,运用项目团队来完成任务已成为企业的普遍现象。     

Attribution Biases in the Evaluation of New Product Development Team Members*

Managers are often concerned with the potential negative reputation impact of being assigned to a new product development project. Social psychology theories, and in particular the group attribution error theory, suggest that their worries might be justified, with individual team members being evaluated on the basis of the overall project performance, without regard for the processes by which the team outcome was reached. The objective of this paper is to empirically test for the existence of such biases in the evaluation of new product development team members. For this purpose, three independent experiments based on scenarios test the extent to which the group attribution error is at play in the evaluation of new product development team members and the extent to which it can be removed. Overall, this paper indicates that this bias does indeed affect the evaluation of new product development team members as well as decisions based on these evaluations. In the studies presented in this paper, analysis of variance showed that subjects inferred that team members' attitudes were consistent with the decision made and failed to adjust adequately for the decision rule used. Subjects then used these summary judgments as the basis for deciding on reward allocations and making competence attributions about the team members. In Study 1 , the decision rule used was either a vote or a team leader decision, and therefore the bias might have been explained by the lack of information available. Study 2 , however, provided unambiguous information about team members' positions, yet subjects did not adequately take this information into account. Study 3 replicated these results with experienced new product team managers, suggesting that theses biases are likely to be at play in the workplace. Moreover, subjects in Studies 2 and 3 felt quite confident that their judgments were being fair, even in the cases where these judgments truly were not, which suggests a lack of awareness of the bias on their part. The robustness of this bias should be cause for concerns for managers working in new product development teams or involved in the evaluation of the performance of such teams. The studies conducted in this paper suggest that team members can get unfairly rewarded or punished for decisions over which they have little or no control and that their reputation can also get affected by these decisions. Moreover, the fact that the group attribution error affected evaluations even in the case where experienced participants had specific information about team members' positions suggests that this bias will not be easy to remove.     

Managing New Product Development Teams in a Globally Dispersed NPD Program

Globalization is a major market trend today, one characterized by both increased international competition as well as extensive opportunities for firms to expand their operations beyond current boundaries. Effectively dealing with this important change, however, makes the management of global new product development (NPD) a major concern. To ensure success in this complex and competitive endeavor, companies must rely on global NPD teams that make use of the talents and knowledge available in different parts of the global organization. Thus, cohesive and well‐functioning global NPD teams become a critical capability by which firms can effectively leverage this much more diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and cultural sensitivities for the global NPD effort. The present research addresses the global NPD team and its impact on performance from both an antecedent and a contingency perspective. Using the resource‐based view (RBV) as a theoretical framework, the study clarifies how the internal, or behavioral, environment of the firm—specifically, resource commitment and senior management involvement—and the global NPD team are interrelated and contribute to global NPD program performance. In addition, the proposed performance relationships are viewed as being contingent on certain explicit, or strategic, factors. In particular, the degree of global dispersion of the firm's NPD effort is seen as influencing the management approach and thus altering the relationships among company background resources, team, and performance. For the empirical analysis, data are collected through a survey of 467 corporate global new product programs (North America and Europe, business‐to‐business). A structural model testing for the hypothesized effects was substantially supported. The results show that creating and effectively managing global NPD teams offers opportunities for leveraging a diverse but unique combination of talents and knowledge‐based resources, thereby enhancing the firm's ability to achieve a sustained competitive advantage in international markets. To function effectively, the global NPD team must be nested in a corporate environment in which there is a commitment of sufficient resources and where senior management plays an active role in leading, championing, and coordinating the global NPD effort. This need for commitment and global team integration becomes even more important for success as the NPD effort becomes more globally dispersed.     

Exploring New Product Development Project Review Practices*

Most organizations use new product development (NPD) processes that consist of activities and review points. Activities basically solve problems and gather and produce information about the viability of successfully completing the project. Interspersed between the development activities are review points where project information is reviewed and a decision is made to either go on to the next stage of the process, stop it prior to completion, or hold it until more information is gathered and a better decision can be made. The review points are for controlling risk, prioritizing projects, and allocating resources, and the review team typically is cross‐disciplinary, comprising senior managers from marketing, finance, research and development (R&D), or manufacturing. Over the past four decades, research has greatly advanced knowledge with respect to NPD activities; however, much less is known about review practices. For this reason, the present paper reports findings of a study on NPD project review practices from 425 Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) members. The focus is on three decision points in the NPD process common across organizations (i.e., initial screen, prior to development and testing, and prior to commercialization). In this paper, the number of (1) review points used, (2) review criteria, (3) decision makers on review committees and the proficiency with which various evaluation criteria are used are compared across incremental and radical projects and across functional areas (i.e., marketing, technical, financial). Furthermore, the associations between these NPD review practices and new product performance are examined. Selected results show that more review points are used for radical NPD projects than incremental ones, and this is related to a relatively lower rate of survival for radical projects. The findings also show that the number of criteria used to evaluate NPD projects increases as NPD projects progress and that the number of review team members grows over the stages, too. Surprisingly, the results reveal that more criteria are used to evaluate incremental NPD projects than radical ones. As expected, managers appear to more proficiently use evaluation criteria when making project continuation/termination decisions for incremental projects; they use these criteria less proficiently during the development of radical projects, precisely when proficiency is most critical. At each review point, technical criteria were found to be the most frequently used type for incremental projects, and financial criteria were the most commonly used type for radical ones. Importantly, only review proficiency is significantly associated with performance; the number of review points, review team size, and number of review criteria are not associated with new product performance. Furthermore, only the coefficient for proficiently using marketing criteria was significantly related to new product program performance; the proficiency of using financial and technical information has no association with performance. Finally, across the three focal review points of the NPD process in this study, only the coefficient for proficiency at the first review point, (i.e., the initial screen) is significantly greater than zero. The results are discussed with respect to research and managerial practice, and future research directions are offered.     

浅谈项目管理过程中团队的建设

项目的成败取决于团队工作的成效,工作成效又受到项目团队建设的影响。本文阐述了项目团队建设过程的四个阶段,从分析加强项目团队建设的重要性出发,提出了项目经理的培养和良好团队建设方法的运用是建设好团队的必要条件。     

New Product Development: Impact of Project Characteristics and Development Practices on Performance

Concurrent product development process and integrated product development teams have emerged as the two dominant new product development (NPD) “best practices” in the literature. Yet empirical evidence of their impact on product development success remains inconclusive. This paper draws upon organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to explore how these two dominant NPD best practices and two key aspects of NPD project characteristics (i.e., project uncertainty and project complexity) directly and jointly affect the NPD performance. Contrary to the “best practice” literature, the analysis, based on 266 NPD projects from three industries (i.e., automotive, electronics, and machinery) across nine countries (i.e., Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States), found no evidence of any direct impact of process concurrency or team integration on overall NPD performance. Instead, there is evidence of negative impact of the interaction between project uncertainty and concurrent NPD process and positive impact of the interaction between project complexity and team integration on overall NPD performance. Moreover, the study found no evidence of any direct negative impact of project uncertainty or complexity on overall NPD performance as suggested in the literature, but found evidence of a direct positive relationship between project complexity and overall NPD performance. The practical implications of these results are significant. First, neither process concurrency nor team integration should be embraced universally as best practice. Second, process concurrency should be avoided in projects with high uncertainty (i.e., when working with unfamiliar product, market, or technology). Finally, team integration should be encouraged for complex product development projects. For a simple product a loosely integrated team or a more centralized decision process may work well. However, as project complexity increases, team integration becomes essential for improved product development. There is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution for managing NPD projects. The choice of a product development practice should be determined by the project characteristics.     

后Tom Ford时代--Tom Ford去职后的新Gucci设计团队

Ford坚持"Gucci是超越文化与民族的"这一核心理念,为古驰创造了全球统一的形象.Ford于1996-97年推出了一系列以70年代为主题的设计,大获成功,一举挽救了岌岌可危的Gucci,令这个濒临破产的品牌成为世界时尚界的宠儿.Ford振兴Gucci的故事,一直是时尚界津津乐道的传奇,而Ford也总是在不断地制造着传奇.     

Antecedents of Team Intuition and Its Impact on the Success of New Product Development Projects

Research on new product development (NPD) team decision making has identified a number of cognitive mechanisms (e.g., team intelligence, teamwork quality, and charged behavior) that appear to guide NPD teams toward effective decisions. Despite an extensive body of literature on these aspects of NPD team decisions, team intuition has yet to be investigated in the context of NPD teams. Intuition is regarded as a form of information processing that differs from cognitive processes, and is associated with gut feelings, hunches, and mystical insights. Past research on intuition suggests that many managers and teams embrace intuition as an effective approach in response to situations in a turbulent environment where decisions need to be made immediately. Past research also revealed various benefits of intuition in decision making. These are: to speed up decision‐making process, to improve decision outcomes such as higher product quality, and to solve less structured problems (e.g., new product planning). This research examines the impact of team‐related antecedents (e.g., team member experience) and decision‐specific antecedents (e.g., decision importance) on intuition in NPD teams. The moderating impact of environmental turbulence between antecedent variables and intuition, as well as between intuition and team performance, is investigated. To test hypotheses, data were collected from 155 NPD projects in Turkey. The results showed that past team member experience, transactive memory systems (TMS), team empowerment, decision importance, and decision motives are significantly related to team intuition. The results also revealed that team intuition is significantly related to product success and speed‐to‐market, with both high and low levels of market turbulence. The findings of this study present some interesting practical implications to managers in order to improve intuitive skills of NPD teams. First, managers should make sure that team members have the relevant expertise to facilitate effective intuition. Second, managers should encourage and enhance TMS for effective intuition. If team members are not able to gain timely and unhindered access to others who have the needed experience and knowledge, past team member experience becomes idle in order to make effective intuitive judgments. Third, managers concerned with achieving successfully developed products and helping teams to make immediate but accurate decisions during NPD process should assign more power to team members so that they can rely on their intuitive skills.     

能源合作:中美关系发展的新动力

中美建交30年来,双方围绕能源和环境问题在技术、资金等方面进行了多层次和多形式的合作,形成了诸多有效的合作机制,取得了一些进展.尽管如此,与两个大国的地位相比,两国在能源领域合作的实质性成果有限,合作潜力远未得到发挥,究其根源有三个方面的原因:中美双方对能源安全概念、利益与风险等的理解有很大的不同;双方在能源环境领域的战略互信明显不足;中美对新能源、气候变化问题的认识及预期存在差异.自2009年初奥巴马政府上台以来,在美国能源环境政策大幅度调整和全球气候变化问题进一步升温的背景下,中美两国在能源和环境领域掀起新一轮合作热潮.种种迹象表明,以清洁能源为核心的能源合作有望成为未来推动中美关系深入发展的新动力.     

构建开放式新型协作体系实现跨越式可持续发展

党的十六届四中全会提出加强党的执政能力建设这是一项具有战略意义的复杂而艰巨的伟大工程站在实践“三个代表”重要思想的高度，结合中国航天科工运载技术研究院(四院)的实际情况，要认真贯彻四中全会精神，关键在于发挥党委的政治核心作用与党员的先锋模范作用，努力将党委的领导能力建设落实到实现四院跨越式可持续协调发展上。当前要解决的一个突出问题是要构建好开放式新型研制生产协作体系，巩固并壮大型号研制生产与民用产业发展的物质基础与文化基础。     

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.     

实施"创新工程"推动施工企业发展

自２０００年以来，在内蒙电力集团公司的支持和帮助下，施工企业以“减员分流”为重点，通过买断、下岗、分流、消肿、退养和产权二元化、资质就位、内部改制等措施，逐步走出了困境。到２００１年９月底，４个施工企业减少富余人员３４００人，完成产值６７７５３万元，比上年同期增长２４２％，利润总额实现１０９９万元，已扭亏为盈，为下一步改制、改组奠定了良好的基础。施工企业真正要走出困境获得新生，必须要按市场化的导向，从体制、机制、管理上进行系统改革，实施“创新工程”，推动施工企业的改革与发展。一、推进体制创新第一…     

加快发展 加强合作 不断创新

在中电联三届四次理事会上,成功举办了“电力企业领导论坛”。论坛的的主题是:在新形势、新格局、新任务下,企业如何创新、竞争、合作、发展。8位大公司的高层领导在论坛上发表了精彩演讲。通过这些演讲,可以使我们更深刻地理解电力体制改革的重要意义和深远影响,更深切地感受到各大电力企业牢牢把握改革机遇,加速发展所焕发出的生机与活力。本刊特将诸位领导的演讲整理刊出,文章的标题均为本刊所加。     

PPP项目资本合作网络:理论模型和案例分析

私人投资者是PPP项目公司的股权投资者,其之间是退出门槛较高的长期资本合作。本文基于社会网络分析方法,提出了PPP项目资本合作网络的理论模型,以2014~2019年财政部PPP项目库中执行阶段项目的数据为基础,构建了私人投资者资本合作网络,对网络基本特征、最大合作集群和节点的中心性进行了分析。研究结果表明:(1)私人投资者之间的资本合作已形成了社会网络,且网络规模仍将继续增长;(2)总体来看,最大合作集群的平均度随时间的演化而减小、平均路径长度随时间的演化而增加;(3)最大合作集群在一定程度上表现出金融机构中心性。     

Distributed New Product Development Project Based on Internet and World-Wide Web: A Case Study

The deluge of hype about the wonders of the Internet, Intranets, and the World Wide Web continues unabated. At the same time, we hear numerous tales about endless streams of busy signals, broken connections, and painfully slow response times. Surveying the apparent gap between the promise and the often-painful reality, a skeptical manager might reasonably question whether this technology can satisfy the rigorous demands of business users such as product development project teams. In a case study of a large, geographically distributed product development project, Ari-Pekka Hameri and Jukka Nihtila find that Web-based applications can play an important role in new-product development (NPD) efforts. Particularly when projects involve numerous teams from various locations, such tools can provide effective media for communicating and disseminating information. The case study also suggests that these networked information technology (IT) applications can offer important benefits in terms of project and process management. The project described in this study involves a major NPD collaboration, with several independent subprojects and hundreds of team members from various research institutes and companies. The Internet and the World Wide Web provide the media for managing and disseminating project data. Using hypertext links, the Web-based system gives team members easy access to engineering drawings, 3D models, parameter lists, prototype test results, and other engineering information. The point-and-click interface also allows team members to access information about the project structure and schedules, as well as meeting notes, newsgroups, and electronic bulletin boards. Analysis of the file-transfer activities between the Web server and the project groups highlights several important points regarding networked IT applications, information sharing, and project management. First, the system used in this project serves primarily for disseminating information, rather than for fostering collaboration between different groups. Increased collaboration among networked team members probably requires more sophisticated version- and configuration-management capabilities. Second, file-transfer activities typically come in bursts around project milestones; this highlights the essential role that project milestones play in coordinating the work of distributed team members. The electronic media enhance not only the work leading up to milestones, but also the dissemination of decisions made at each milestone.     

潍坊物流产业发展与物流人才队伍建设

物流业是服务业的重要组成部分,发展潜力巨大,前景十分广阔。潍坊区位优越、交通便捷、资源丰富、物流服务水平较高,具有发展成为山东半岛物流中心的良好条件和独特优势。本文对相关工作重点和物流人才队伍建设提出对策。     

浅析当代企业发展中的团队精神

团队精神是企业竞争力的核心,也是企业成败的关键。发扬团队精神能够增强企业的凝聚力和战斗力,提高企业的创新意识,促进企业内部的团结与合作,最终使企业脱颖而出,屹立于时代的前列。为此,要在企业之林立于不败之地,就应该建立一个稳定、忠实、团结的高效率团队。