Management Practices Influencing New Product Success and Failure in the United States and Scandinavia: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study

This comparative cross-cultural study of United States (U.S.) and Scandinavian telecommunications products found both similarities and differences in the successful new product development (NPD) management practices within the U.S. and Scandinavia. Proficiencies in conducting development, marketing, and customer service activities were identified as important to NPD success in both Scandinavia and the U.S. However, differences between the U.S. and Scandinavia were found with regard to the importance of research and development/marketing integration and project manager competency, with these aspects being more important to NPD success in the U.S. Additional differences between Scandinavia and the U.S. were found in the successful NPD strategies for entering familiar versus unfamiliar markets, with the Scandinavian systems being more oriented toward product design strategies. The overall results characterized U.S. NPD management systems as product-market oriented, task focused, and project management driven. By comparison, the Scandinavian NPD management systems were characterized as product-service oriented, driven by enduring interpersonal relationships and socially oriented to helping others. These characterizations were found to be consistent with dissimilarities in the national cultures of the U.S. and Scandinavia, suggesting that some core NPD management principles may be generally important to success, whereas others may be culturally dependent. The importance of recognizing these differences is pointed out in a discussion of their implications for NPD theory and practice in today's global economy. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.     

Impact of Knowledge Type and Strategic Orientation on New Product Creativity and Advantage in High‐Technology Firms

As different types of knowledge may have different effects on new product positional advantage, knowledge portfolio management in concert with the firm's strategic orientation is indispensable for new product success. However, previous research has not dealt with the knowledge resources and strategic implementations that affect new product development (NPD). To fill in this gap, the current study focuses on two dimensions of knowledge type (knowledge complexity and knowledge tacitness) and two forms of strategic orientation (technological orientation and market orientation), which influence the positional advantages as determinants of NPD outcomes. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study explains how these knowledge and strategic orientation variables influence new product creativity, which comprised the novel and meaningful characteristics of new products. Finally, it demonstrates how these two dimensions of new product creativity differentially provide product advantages in terms of customer satisfaction and product differentiation, which lead to superior new product performance. A conceptual framework is developed and the related hypotheses provided to incorporate the study variables and to test their relationships in a sample based on data collected from both marketing and project managers from 100 U.S. high‐technology firms. The model estimation results from path analysis demonstrate that reliance on knowledge of high tacitness harms meaningfulness, while reliance on knowledge of high complexity increases both novelty and meaningfulness of new product. As expected, market orientation and technological orientation improve the meaningfulness and novelty dimensions of the new product, respectively. New product novelty and meaningfulness are shown to enhance new product advantage in terms of product differentiation and customer satisfaction, both of which contribute to new product performance. It is also found that the combinative use of market orientation and knowledge complexity, and technological orientation and knowledge tacitness positively influence both the novelty and meaningfulness of new products. This study, using the product‐level analysis, contributes to the literature by clarifying how the firm's different knowledge properties and strategic orientations both play a role as a source of new product creativity, and how new product creativity, as a valuable and rare resource, enhances new product advantage. The study results suggest that project/product managers should increase the transferability and codifiability of unstructured knowledge by stimulating intraorganizational knowledge sharing among NPD team members, and that they should promote both technology and market‐orientated practices to fully develop creativity of new products.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The Role of Sales in NPD: An Investigation of the U.S. Health‐Care Industry

The new product development (NPD) literature emphasizes that the success of new products strongly depends on a firm's capability to understand customer needs and translate them into new products. Because of their close relationships with customers, salespeople are in the ideal position to connect the firm's NPD efforts to its customers. The extant literature on the role of sales in NPD focuses on either sales’ contribution to generating new product ideas or the adoption of new products by salespeople, while a systematic study of sales’ contribution during all NPD stages is lacking. In addition, the role of sales is typically studied in isolation, while in practice, the role of sales depends on the relationship between sales and marketing. This article addresses these gaps in the literature by reporting on an empirical investigation of the role of sales during the entire NPD process in the U.S. health‐care industry, taking into account the complexities of the sales‐marketing dynamic. The article is based on interviews with 21 sales and 15 marketing informants from the U.S. health‐care industry, both pharmaceutical firms (selling drugs to physicians) and device manufacturing firms. Our findings highlight how salespeople are distant from NPD process during the discovery stage. Salespeople are focused on selling to customers, and marketing keeps sales distant from the NPD process. During the development stage, sales is still only indirectly involved in NPD through its relationship with marketing. During commercialization, however, marketing takes the driver's seat and strongly involves sales in the various (pre)launch activities. But while salespeople are mostly indirectly involved in NPD, sales managers have a closer relationship with sales and are more directly involved. The findings also show how the involvement of sales is influenced by characteristics of the health‐care industry. Thus, this article contributes to our understanding of the role of sales in NPD by integrating theoretical perspectives from the sales‐marketing interface literature into the NPD literature.     

Key Factors Affecting Customer Evaluation of Discontinuous New Products

Common sense, as well as plenty of research, tells us that customer feedback can play an important role in successful product development efforts. By understanding the key factors that affect customers' evaluations of a new product, a project team improves its chances of making the right decisions throughout the design and development effort. However, customers typically lack a useful frame of reference for evaluating discontinuous, or really new products. In all likelihood, the key factors that affect customers' evaluations of radically new products differ from those for incremental innovations. Robert Veryzer describes the results of a study that examines the customer research efforts and findings of seven firms involved in the development of discontinuous new products. This study has the following objectives: gaining insight into the customer research inputs such companies use during the development of discontinuous new products, and exploring the critical factors that influence customers' evaluations of these really new products. The subjects in this study conducted relatively little formal customer research during the early stages of the NPD projects. The methods used for obtaining customer input during the concept generation and exploration stages were primarily qualitative. Although the companies in the study still did not focus consistently on customer issues during the technical development and design stage, the less discontinuous projects did use such traditional quantitative techniques as concept tests, clinics, and experiments during this phase of NPD. Throughout the projects in this study, the real opportunities for obtaining customer input came during the prototype testing and commercialization phases of the NPD projects. Several key factors appeared to influence customer evaluations of the products that were being developed by the NPD teams in this study. Lack of familiarity was manifested in customers' resistance to the new products in the study. Similarly, unfamiliarity with these new products often seemed to lead customers to focus on product attributes that development team members viewed as relatively unimportant. Other factors that affected customer evaluation of the products in this study included customer uncertainty about the benefits and risks associated with the product, customers' ability to understand how the product operates, perceptions of the product's safety, and product aesthetics.     

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.     

Improving the New Product Development Process: A Fractal Paradigm for High-Technology Products

Those professionals who are charged with improving the new product development (NPD) process may well feel as though they have been asked to bring order out of chaos. For every level in the organization, and for every step in the NPD process, they must contend with myriad, often interdependent choices—of products and processes; of tools and technologies; of proven best practices and hypothesized solutions. In turn, each choice may cascade into several additional decisions. With so many issues to address and so many variables to consider, practioners and researchers alike need a clear, but complete, framework for exploring, understanding, and improving the NPD process. To help bring some order to the study and the practice of NPD management, W. Austin Spivey, J. Michael Munson, and John H. Wolcott introduce a new metaphor, or paradigm, for product development: a fractal paradigm. Like some fractal images, their framework for understanding the essence of NPD rests on the concept of self-similarity. In other words, the picture their framework provides for understanding and managing the NPD process consists of the same set of concerns, regardless of the level at which the process is viewed. They developed this fractal paradigm during an empirical study of technology transition in a highly successful federal laboratory organization. Whether the focus is on the organization, the division, the team, or the individual, the essence of the NPD process as viewed through their framework comes down to two sets of factors: management factors and resource factors. In turn, each of these factors cascades into several interrelated sets of concerns. For example, the management factors comprise concerns about leadership and the management system. The resource factors include concerns about information, infrastructure, time, and money. Regardless of the level of detail at which the framework is viewed, improving the NPD process requires attention to all of these factors, by all levels within the organization. For example, visionary leadership on the part of senior management will have little effect if middle management and line supervisors fail to provide the necessary leadership for their respective groups of subordinates. Notwithstanding the complexity of the NPD process, the fractal paradigm focuses attention on those few key factors that must be managed continually, throughout all levels of the organization, to ensure successful commercialization of new products.     

The Impact of a Creativity‐supporting Work Environment on a Firm's Product Innovation Performance

Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that a creativity‐supporting work environment contributes to a firm's product innovation performance. Although there is evidence that such an environment enhances innovative behavior at individual level, very few studies address the effect of a creativity‐supporting work environment on product innovation performance at firm level, and the results are inconsistent. This paper examines the relationship between a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment and a firm's product innovation performance in a sample of 103 firms. For measuring a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment, a comprehensive and creativity‐focused framework is used. The framework consists of 9 social‐organizational and 12 physical work environment characteristics that are likely to enhance employee creativity. These characteristics contribute to the firm's overall work environment that supports creativity. The firm's product innovation performance is defined by two distinct concepts: new product productivity (NP productivity), which is the extent to which the firm introduces new products to the market, and new product success (NP success), which is the percentage of the firm's sales from new products. In most firms, different knowledgeable informants provided the data for the variables. The results show that firms with creativity‐supporting work environments introduce more new products to the market (NP productivity), and have more NP success in terms of new product sales (NP success). NP productivity partly mediates the relationship between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success. The mediation model shows that the two paths from a creativity‐supporting work environment to NP success are about equally important: the direct path between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success has a coefficient of .22, and the coefficient of the indirect path via NP productivity is .23. The creativity‐supporting work environment framework can be used in managerial practice to enhance employee creativity for product innovation. It allows applying a flexible and broad approach by influencing both social‐organizational and physical characteristics of the work environment.     

Customer interactivity and new product performance: Moderating effects of product newness and product embeddedness

Understanding customer needs which drive significant product innovation is particularly challenging for new product development (NPD) organizations. Research has addressed how organizations benefit from interacting with customers, but more conceptualization is needed into the dimensions of the customer interaction process. In a business-to-business (B2B) setting, customer interactivity is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional construct consisting of bidirectional communications, participation, and joint problem solving during NPD projects. Drawing upon organizational information processing theory, customer interactivity is hypothesized to be positively related to customer information quality when developing highly innovative products, but not when developing modifications or extensions of existing products. Another condition affecting this relationship studied is the embeddedness of the new product in the customer's business environment. Customer interactivity is hypothesized to be positively related to information quality for highly embedded product, but not for low embedded product. Results from a sample of NPD organizations in several B2B industries support these hypotheses. The study contributes to the marketing literature and practice by identifying important dimensions of the customer interaction process which lead to more proactive organizations, and identifying two moderating conditions of the customer interactivity and NPD performance relationship.     

Creativity Business Discipline = Higher Profits Faster from New Product Development

A study was conducted of 69 analysts evaluating 267 early-stage new product development (NPD) projects in a major global chemical company over a 10-year time span. Positive correlations were found between profits resulting from NPD project analyses and the degree of creativity of the analysts evaluating those projects. Creativity can be reliably measured with standard psychological instruments, such as the MBTI® Creativity Index. Analysts with MBTI Creativity Indices above the median for the group studied identified opportunities providing 12 to 13 times more profit than those with MBTI Creativity Indices below the median, when both groups were rigorously trained and coached in "stage-gate" business analysis methods.
NPD requires breakthrough creativity because the first ideas for commercialization are almost never commercial until they have been substantially revised through a thought process involving branching. It is therefore most productive to preselect innovative, creative people for the early stages of NPD, and then teach this group the business discipline required in stage-gate NPD processes.
The results show that by utilizing these principles, both the overall speed and productivity of typical NPD processes can be increased approximately nine-fold, or nearly an order of magnitude when compared to today's typical linear stage-gate processes.     

Exploring the Nonlinear Impact of Organizational Integration on New Product Market Success

This article explores the nonlinear relationship between organizational integration and new product market success (NPMS). The concept of organizational integration was measured by assessing the degree of integration among various groups of people involved in the development of new products including new product development (NPD) teams that are typically the focal points of NPD efforts. New product market success was measured by examining four often‐used measures of NPD success. The mail survey research approach was used to gather empirical data from NPD managers in three major industries. The data gathered from this survey process were used as the basis from which to extract information to address this study's major research questions, which include: (1) How is the degree of new product market success related to the nonlinear degree to which groups of people (including NPD teams) integrate during NPD processes? and (2) How is the degree of new product market success related to the nonlinear degree to which separate groups of people (e.g., customers, suppliers, and functional departments) integrate during NPD processes? This study found that high levels of organizational integration (overall organizational integration and supplier organizational integration) during NPD processes are associated with high levels of new product market success. Additionally, this study found that the relationship between new product market success and organizational integration (customer organizational integration and functional organization integration) during NPD processes exhibit nonlinear, U‐shaped relationships. Therefore, the first important finding of this study confirms that various forms of organizational integration impact in a positive way the market success of new products. This suggests that management responsible for all NPD projects should consciously integrate important groups of people to support such developments. This study's findings also confirm and imply that new product developers in the studied industries should integrate marketing and research and development (R&D) over the duration of the NPD process. This suggests that new product managers must be proactive to assure that members of NPD teams are actively engaged with groups of supporting people within and outside new‐product–producing organizations. Unlike prior research, a major finding of this study suggests that the association between organizational integration and new product market success does not form inverted U‐shaped relationships. Data from this research imply that new product market success is linearly influenced by overall and supplier organizational integration. However, this study's data suggest that new product market success is nonlinearly influenced by customer and functional organizational integration. This study's data suggest that when customer organizational integration and/or functional organizational integration is increased, new product market success can be increased at a rate which is greater than a linear rate.     

New Product Development in Rapidly Changing Markets: An Exploratory Study

Rapid technological change can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, investors and firms of all sizes hope to reap the rewards that may arise from the apparent convergence of the computer, telecommunications, and entertainment industries. With the high level of uncertainty inherent to such rapidly changing markets, however, those potentially dazzling returns are counterbalanced by a daunting level of risk. John Mullins and Daniel Sutherland suggest that firms operating in such markets require NPD practices that can mitigate risk, manage uncertainty, and, of course, increase the likelihood of new product success. To gain insight into the NPD practices that can meet those challenges, they conducted in-depth interviews with managers who were directly involved in NPD projects at US WEST, Inc., a large, multinational firm in the telecommunications industry. The study focused on identifying practices that help the firm bring new products into rapidly changing markets quickly, efficiently, and effectively. A key objective of their study was to go beyond the basics—for example, the use of cross-functional teams—to identify specific practices that allow the firm to address the various levels of uncertainty that characterize its markets. They identify three levels of uncertainty that confront firms operating in rapidly changing markets. First, potential customers cannot easily articulate needs that a new technology may fulfill. Consequently, NPD managers are uncertain about the market opportunities that a new technology offers. Second, NPD managers are uncertain about how to turn the new technologies into products that meet customer needs. This uncertainty arises, not only from customers' inability to articulate their needs, but also from managers' difficulties in translating technological advancements into product features and benefits. Finally, senior management faces uncertainty about how much capital to invest in pursuit of rapidly changing markets as well as when to invest. The study identifies six practices that help the firm address the uncertainty and risk inherent in its rapidly changing markets. For example, market research in this firm's NPD process focuses more on probing than it does on measuring. Involvement of prospective customers in idea generation and the use of prototypes early in the NPD process help the firm uncover customer needs and market opportunities. Large-scale, quantitative market research focuses primarily on determining market size and price points.     

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.     

Innovation Performance in New Product Development Teams in China's Technology Ventures: The Role of Behavioral Integration Dimensions and Collective Efficacy

In emerging markets, technology ventures increasingly rely on new product development (NPD) teams to generate creative ideas and to mold these innovative ideas into streams of new products or services. However, little is known about how behavioral integration (a behavioral team process) and collective efficacy (a motivational team process) jointly facilitate or inhibit team innovation performance in emerging markets—especially in China, the world's largest emerging‐market setting with collectivist and high power distance cultures. Drawing on social cognitive theory and behavioral integration research, this article elucidates the relationships between behavioral integration dimensions (i.e., collaborative behavior, information exchange, and joint decision‐making) and innovation performance and also examines how collective efficacy moderates these relationships in China's NPD teams. Results from a sample of 96 NPD teams in China's technology ventures reveal that information exchange is positively associated with innovation performance. Collaborative behavior positively but marginally influences innovation performance, whereas joint decision‐making does not relate to innovation performance. Moreover, collective efficacy demonstrates an important moderating role. Specifically, both collaborative behavior and joint decision‐making are more positively associated with innovation performance when collective efficacy is higher. In contrast, information exchange is less positively associated with innovation performance when collective efficacy is higher. This study makes important theoretical contributions to the literature on team innovation and behavioral integration in emerging markets by offering a better understanding of how behavioral and motivational team processes jointly shape innovation performance in China's NPD teams. This study also extends social cognitive theory by identifying collective efficacy as a boundary condition for the overall effectiveness of behavioral integration dimensions. In particular, this study highlights the condition under which behavioral integration dimensions facilitate or inhibit NPD team innovation performance in China.     

A multi-level investigation of international marketing projects: The roles of experiential knowledge and creativity on performance

This study, using a sample of Korean multinational corporations, focuses on testing the relationships between the constructs of experiential knowledge, creativity, and performance in the context of international marketing projects. Relying on a multi-level conceptualization of experiential knowledge and creativity, our findings suggest that process-based creativity is enhanced when the team members have a higher level of experiential knowledge, but outcome-based creativity is not significantly influenced by either team- or firm-level experiential knowledge. It is concluded that, in the context of international marketing projects, the domain-relevant knowledge of the actors (i.e., the team-level experiential knowledge in the foreign markets) largely governs the level of their process-based creativity. The findings also suggest that project performance is directly influenced by firm-level experiential knowledge and process-based creativity, and is indirectly influenced by team-level experiential knowledge through the mediation of process-based creativity.     

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.