What Distinguishes the Top Performing New Products in Financial Services

Despite previous comparisons of success and unsuccessful new products, an Important question remains unaddressed: What separates very successful new service products from the ordinary? Robert Cooper, Christopher Easingwood, Scott Edgett, Elko Kleinschmidt, and Chris Storey obtained data on 173 new financial services and identified three performance dimensions: financial performance, relationship enhancement, and market development. Of eleven potential success determinants, nine were found to be drivers of performance. Management implications included the need for a market-driven, customer-focused new product process, greater emphasis on planning and executing the launch, the role of product design, and project prioritization factors.     

Externally Directed and Internally Directed Market Launch Management: The Role of Organizational Factors in Influencing New Product Success

Introducing new products remains a critical challenge for managers. Consumer acceptance of new products is key to new product success and requires the effective implementation of market launch activities. The present study describes the relationship between different types of market launch activities and market‐related, time‐related, and financial market launch success. The study's framework extends previous work on launch management by complementing the view that launch activities are predominantly outwardly directed with the notion that launch management can also be inwardly directed. More specifically, launch activities can both target customers as the external audience, for example, via communication and pricing, and address an internal audience, such as management and sales personnel, for example, using departmental coordination or employee incentives. The study also sets out to investigate how situational factors impact the relative effectiveness of both externally directed and internally directed launch activities in engendering successful new product launches. In particular, product newness, technology drivers, and firm size are considered as relevant variables. Structural equation analysis of data on 178 new products across industries provide empirical evidence that market launch success depends on the intensity of both externally directed and internally directed market launch activities. With regard to the overall impact of internally directed activities, the findings confirm that organizational factors and antecedents indeed play a critical role in new product launch and its respective performance with internally directed activities having an even stronger impact on time‐related and financial success than outwardly directed instruments. Specifically, these internal activities are often viewed as idiosyncratic resources that are hard for competitors to observe and are therefore more difficult—if not impossible—to replicate compared to externally directed activities in market launch. The paper clearly pinpoints that the successful launch of new products is a complex task that also necessitates the implementation of internally directed launch activities. Fast market penetration requires coordination among the different internal players as well as support from top management. Furthermore, the financial objectives of the market launch can only be met if employees and executives both receive the necessary incentives and support to effectively execute the new product introduction. The study also demonstrates that moderators impact the strength of the effectiveness of these two different types of market launch activities. This research provides important implications for launch management by advocating that the two foci on external and internal constituencies should not be pursued in isolation but that instead, the opposite is true.     

Launch Decisions and the Early Market Survival of Innovations: An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Mobile Value‐Added Services (VAS) Industry

There is a surprisingly high number of new products and services that fail to produce enough return on the firm's investments in development and launch activities. Literature has shown that these failures can be due to a poorly planned and executed launch. Although a vast stream of research has studied how strategic and tactical launch decisions affect the performance of new products and services, some issues still need theoretical and empirical investigation. This paper aims to extend new product launch research in two ways. First, it studies how tactical launch decisions (i.e., investments in advertising and involvement of external organizations in the launch process) interact with an important strategic choice (i.e., the degree of radicalness of the new product or service) to affect new product performance. Second, it focuses on a particular dimension of performance, that is, early market survival, which has been overlooked in launch strategy and tactics research so far. Using a data set comprising more than 9300 new mobile value‐added services launched in Italy between 2003 and 2006, the paper finds that launch tactics interact with the radicalness of the innovation to affect early market survival. In particular, communicating the distinctive characteristics of the new product or service and partnering with external organizations during the launch process are tactics that work particularly well with radical innovations. This is possibly due to the fact that they help reduce customers’ uncertainty regarding expected benefits and transaction costs, and hence contribute to win their resistance to adopt the innovation soon after launch. Investments in corporate advertising lead instead to a tangible improvement of the probability of early market survival for both radical and incremental innovations. In other words, the positive impact on the probability of early survival of increasing investments in corporate advertising appears to be relevant for both radically and incrementally new services. One possible explanation is that this tactic helps increase the number of potential customers who come to know about the existence of the innovating firms and its offering soon after launch, but this is likely to be equally important to stimulate early diffusion of both incremental and radical innovations.     

A Survey of New Product Evaluation Models

New product development is a dynamic and lengthy process ranging from idea generation through product launch. It is quite important that product managers evaluate the viability of a new product at every stage of its development. Previous literature provides a large number of models that can be used to evaluate new products at different stages of the new product development process. These models vary with respect to their objectives, applicability to different products, data requirements, suitable environments and time frames, and diagnostics. This article presents a critical review of the models with an emphasis on these factors. The article also outlines other emerging methods that companies are using today. It concludes with managerial and research implications. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.     

Criteria employed for go/no-go decisions when developing successful highly innovative products

Based on a sample of 77 highly innovative products, this study examines the usage and the relative importance of a set of go/no-go decision criteria at four major gates of the new product development (NPD) process. The findings reveal that go/no-go criteria can be grouped into five dimensions: strategic fit, technical feasibility, customer acceptance, market opportunity, and financial performance. Strategic fit dimension is mainly applied in approving the new product concept. Technical feasibility dimension is crucial in approving the new product concept and the product prototype. The usage of customer acceptance dimension is notably high throughout the entire development process, particularly after product launch. Market opportunity dimension is mostly employed to approve the new product concept and the maintenance of the product on the market. Financial performance dimension stands out near the end of the development process.     

Heading for new shores: Do service and hybrid innovations outperform product innovations in industrial companies?

This study investigates the financial outcomes of product, service, and hybrid innovations in industrial markets. To date, empirical research has focused on product innovations, yet industrial firms are increasingly competing with innovative services to maintain their competitive edge. This study assesses the financial impact of service and hybrid innovations compared with more traditional product innovations. We develop a unique data set that combines information on companies' innovation activities with objective financial data. From a sample of 348 German industrial firms, the analysis reveals that service innovations do not outperform product innovations in industrial markets. A focus on service innovations only pays off in highly price-conscious markets. In contrast, hybrid innovations, referring to the simultaneous market introduction of new products and services, have a positive effect on firm performance above and beyond pure product innovations. This effect is particularly pronounced in competitive markets and under conditions of high customer concentration. In sum, this study demonstrates that hybrid innovations outperform both, pure product and service innovations in industrial markets.     

Launch Decisions and New Product Success: An Empirical Comparison of Consumer and Industrial Products

Many articles have investigated new product development success and failure. However, most of them have used the vantage point of characteristics of the product and development process in this research. In this article we extend this extensive stream of research, looking at factors affecting success; however, we look at the product in the context of the launch support program. We empirically answer the question of whether successful launch decisions differ for consumer and industrial products and identify how they differ. From data collected on over 1,000 product introductions, we first contrast consumer product launches with industrial product launches to identify key differences and similarities in launch decisions between market types. For consumer products, strategic launch decisions appear more defensive in nature, as they focus on defending current market positions. Industrial product strategic launch decisions seem more offensive, using technology and innovation to push the firm to operate outside their current realm of operations and move into new markets. The tactical marketing mix launch decisions (product, place, promotion and price) also differ markedly across the products launched for the two market types. Successful products were contrasted with failed products to identify those launch decisions that discriminate between both outcomes. Here the differences are more of degree rather than principle. Some launch decisions were associated with success for consumer and industrial products alike. Launch successes are more likely to be broader assortments of more innovative product improvements that are advertised with print advertising, independent of market. Other launch decisions uniquely related to success per product type, especially at the marketing mix level (pricing, distribution, and promotion in particular). The launch decisions most frequently made by firms are not well aligned with factors associated with higher success. Additionally, comparing the decisions associated with success to the recommendations for launches from the normative literature suggests that a number of conventional heuristics about how to launch products of each type will actually lead to failure rather than success.     

Do Social Media Tools Impact the Development Phase? An Exploratory Study

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collaboratively design, manage, and launch new products and services. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what influence these new IT tools have on NPD performance. Through a project‐level, exploratory, empirical study, the impact of these new IT tools on the development phase of the NPD process is investigated. We find that the use of these new tools is significantly lower than the adoption of traditional IT tools such as e‐mail and computer‐aided‐design. Traditional tools have a significant, positive impact on NPD outcomes, including team collaboration, the concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Interestingly, new media tools such as project wikis and shared collaboration spaces also have a significant, positive impact on concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Surprisingly, social networking tools like weblogs and Twitter negatively impact management evaluation while having no impact on NPD team collaboration and concepts/prototypes generated. These results suggest that social networking tools in their current guise are not helpful to the NPD team and may in fact be distracting to innovation management during the development phase.     

First Product Success: A Mediated Moderating Model of Resources,Founding Team Startup Experience,and Product‐Positioning Strategy

The success of the first product is of paramount importance for the future development of the new venture. Developing and launching a first product in the Chinese market is even more challenging than in a well‐developed market economy because of weak enforcement of intellectual property laws, a general consumer distrust of new products developed by Chinese firms, and the immediate threat of copycat. This article develops a mediated moderating model to examine first product success in Chinese new ventures, in which product‐positioning strategy (conceptualized as the degree of product differentiation) mediates the impacts of marketing resources, technical resources, and founding team startup experience on product success (conceptualized as timing of product launch and product market and financial performance). Furthermore, we argue that founding team startup experience moderates the impact of marketing and technical resources on building strong product‐positioning strategy. We test our conceptual model using a sample of 909 new products developed by 909 Chinese new ventures in a two‐step selection model. The empirical results provide important insight for new ventures' first product development. Product differentiation does not mediate the impact of marketing resource on product success; but it fully mediates the impact of technical resources on timing of product launch and partially mediates the impact of technical resources on product performance. Marketing resources have significant direct positive effects on both product performance and timing of product launch. Surprisingly, the impacts of marketing resources on product differentiation and product performance are negatively, not positively, moderated by founding team experience. When the founding team has nine years or less startup experience, an increase in marketing resources leads to a significant increase in product differentiation; and when the founding team has more than nine years of startup experience, an increase in marketing resources will not lead to an increase in product differentiation. The impact of marketing resources on product performance is smaller for founding teams with more prior startup experience than those with less prior startup experience. The impacts of technical resources are not moderated by founding team startup experience. Technical resources positively affect product market and financial performance directly as well as through its positive impacts on product differentiation. However, technical resources can negatively affect timing of the product launch because developing a highly differentiated produce can potentially delay the launch of the product. Therefore, new ventures have to be mindful in managing the available resources to succeed in the first product development.     

Industrial New Product Launch Strategies and Product Development Performance

Just as reporters must answer a few fundamental questions in every story they write, decision-makers in the new product development (NPD) process must address five key issues: what to launch, where to launch, when to launch, why to launch, and how to launch. These decisions involve significant commitments of time, money, and resources. They also go a long way toward determining the success or failure of any new product. Deeper insight into the tradeoffs these decisions involve may help to increase the likelihood of success for product launch efforts. Erik Jan Hultink, Abbie Griffin, Susan Hart, and Henry Robben present the results of a study that examines the interplay between these product launch decisions and NPD performance. Noting that previous launch studies focus primarily on the tactical decisions (that is, how to launch) rather than on the strategic decisions (what, where, when, and why to launch), they explore not only which decisions are important to success, but also the associations between the two sets of decisions. Because the strategic launch decisions made early in the NPD process affect the tactical decisions made later in the process, their study emphasizes the importance of launch consistency—that is, the alignment of the strategic and tactical decisions made throughout the process. The survey respondents—managers from marketing, product development, or general management in U.K. firms—provided information about 221 industrial new products launched during the previous five years. The responses identify associations between various sets of strategic and tactical decisions. That is, the responses suggest that the strategic decisions managers make regarding product innovativeness, market targeting, the number of competitors, and whether the product is marketing- or technology-driven are associated with subsequent tactical decisions regarding branding, distribution expenditure and intensity, and pricing. The study also suggests that different sets of launch decisions have differing effects on performance of industrial new products. In this study, the greatest success was enjoyed by a small group of respondents categorized as Niche Innovators. Their launch strategy involves a niche focus, targeting innovative products into markets with few competitors. Tactical decisions made by this group include exclusive distribution, a skimming pricing strategy, and a broad product assortment.     

Organizational Influences on the New Product Development Process in Financial Services

The last decade has been notable for increasing levels of environmental turbulence brought about by technological advances, deregulation, consumer sophistication, and competition. Consequently a premium has been placed on the ability of managers to differentiate their products and maintain competitive advantages. This may be achieved by developing an organizational climate that is responsive to change and supportive of new product initiatives. In his article, Des Thwaites draws on the established literature and a panel of informed opinion from the financial services sector to identify 12 characteristics of an organization that influence the effectiveness of the new product development process. United Kingdom building societies are examined to determine the emphasis given to these critical aspects of innovation. Three underlying factors, communication, people and mission, explain much of the variance among building societies. Five discrete groupings of firms are identified, and significant differences between their orientations are determined across a range of variables supporting new product development. While the empirical section of the study relates to a specific industrial sector, several issues and the recommendations transcend industry boundaries.     

New Industrial Financial Services: What Distinguishes the Winners

Robert Cooper and Ulricke de Brentani report the results of their study of firms participating in the industrial financial services industry. Using a self-administered questionnaire, they obtained data on 56 successful and 50 failed products and found that success and failure are strongly associated with eleven important dimensions: synergy, product/market fit, quality of execution of the launch, unique/superior product, quality of execution of marketing activities, market growth and size, service expertise, quality of execution of technical activities, quality of service delivery, quality of execution of pre-development activities, and the presence of tangible elements of the service offering. They report some surprises, including their observation that while new to the firm, products entail more risk than "close to home" ones, the resulting level of success is not sharply reduced.     

Expert Systems: An Emerging Technology for Selecting New Product Winners

Sundaresan Ram and Sudha Ram describe INNOVATOR, an expert system that they have developed to assess the success potential of new products in the financial services industry. They provide details on key aspects of the system: how knowledge is collected from experts and encoded; how a user interacts with the system to obtain recommendations on specific new products; and how the inference engine of the system arrives at the final recommendation. They discuss how INNOVATOR can, if necessary, be linked to external databases for additional data inputs. The authors also recommend alternative ways of eliciting the expertise of new product planners and different ways of programming their knowledge into the system. They highlight the key advantages that an expert system provides over conventional new product planning models. With its ability to detect potential winners early, an expert system like INNOVATOR can significantly contribute to the new product development process.     

Which Tangible and Intangible Assets Matter for Innovation Speed in Start‐Ups?*

The launch of the first product is an important event for start‐ups, because it takes the new venture closer to growth, profitability, and financial independence. The new product development (NPD) literature mainly focuses its attention on NPD processes in large firms. In this article insights on the antecedents on innovation speed in large firms are combined with resource‐based theory and insights from the entrepreneurship literature to develop hypotheses concerning the antecedents of innovation speed in start‐ups. In particular, tangible assets such as starting capital and the stage of product development at founding and intangible assets such as team tenure, experience of founders, and collaborations with third parties are considered as important antecedents for innovation speed in start‐ups. A unique data set on research‐based start‐ups (RBSUs) was collected, and event‐history analyses were used to test the hypotheses. The rich qualitative data on the individual companies are used to explain the statistical findings. This article shows that RBSUs differ significantly in their starting conditions. The impact of starting conditions on innovation speed differs between software and other companies. Although intuition suggests that start‐ups that are further in the product development cycle at founding launch their first product faster, our data indicate that software firms starting with a beta version experience slower product launch. The amount of initial financing has no significant effect on innovation speed. Next, it is shown that team tenure and experience of founders leads to faster product launch. Contrary to expectations, alliances with other firms do not significantly affect innovation speed, and collaborations with universities are associated with longer development times.     

The Performance Impact of Content and Process in Product Innovation Charters

The significance of product innovation charters (PICs) cannot be overemphasized, as they provide understanding and a tool for setting organizational goals, charting strategic direction, and allocating resources for new product portfolios. In a unique way, a PIC represents a sort of mission statement mutation for new products. With the backdrop of strategy formulation and product innovation literatures, this article investigates the impact of both content specificity within PICs and satisfaction with the PIC formulation process on new product performance in North American corporations. A survey was undertaken among executives knowledgeable about their organization's new product development process. The respondents included chief executive officers, vice presidents, directors, and managers. The findings demonstrate that significant differences exist both in PIC content specificity and process satisfaction between highly innovative and low innovative firms. The study also shows that PIC specificity in terms of the factors mission content and strategic directives positively influences new product performance. Further, the study demonstrates that satisfaction with the process of formulating PICs plays a positive and powerful mediating role in the PIC specificity–performance relationship. The results suggest that product innovation charters, like their mission statement cousins, may be of more value than most managers realize. The study shows that achieving a state of organizational satisfaction with a PIC's formulation process is critical for obtaining better new product performance. Directions for future research also are suggested.     

The Effects of Competition in Short Product Life‐Cycle Markets: The Case of Motion Pictures*

It is critically important to understand the relationship between new product launch strategies and their interaction with the competitive environment, which results in the successful introduction of new products. Deciding when to launch new products is among the most significant issues facing managers when formulating new products strategy, especially for products with short product life cycles. However, little extant research has focused on the interaction of product launch timing and the competitive market environment. This study explores the effects of four types of competitive threats on the market performance of short product life‐cycle products. Threats from new products and incumbents are possible. Also, products in the same category and those in related product categories exert competitive pressures. In this paper, a framework of competitive threats is developed, and research questions are constructed and empirically tested using the motion pictures industry as the focus of this research. A set of simultaneous equations was estimated using a sample of 2,948 movies introduced in the U.S. market between 1997 and 2004. The results show that all competition types have negative direct, indirect (as mediated by distribution intensity), and total effects on the performance of a new product. For a focal product, incumbent products exert a greater negative impact on performance than new entrants. Surprisingly, products in different, but related, categories are more harmful to the performance of products than products in the same category. The results have important implications for launch timing and new product performance.     

Launch Strategy and New Product Performance: An Empirical Examination in The Netherlands

Although previous research has investigated the concept and contents of new product performance, there is still no consensus about the managerial decisions that constitute a launch strategy and how such decisions impact new product performance. The research objective for the present investigation is to assess the impact of launch strategy and market characteristics on new product performance and to test the stability of this impact across consumer and industrial products. Data were collected on 272 consumer and industrial new products in The Netherlands through a mail questionnaire approach. We based our definition of a launch strategy on an extensive literature review and interviews with managers. Our conceptualization of new product performance represented two dimensions, namely, market acceptance and product performance. The market acceptance dimension reflects the new product's market position and sales levels. The product performance dimension refers to the quality and technical performance level of the new product. This richer specification of the dependent variable provides a better view on which launch decisions impact which dimensions of new product performance. The impact of launch strategy was higher for market acceptance than for product performance, overall and for both consumer and industrial subsamples separately. In line with results from recent studies, overall, market acceptance is influenced by the product's innovativeness, timing of market entry, breadth of assortment, branding, pricing, the objective of increasing market penetration, and competitor reactions. Product performance is influenced by the product's innovativeness, breadth of assortment, and by the objective of using an existing market. Analyzing the consumer and industrial products separately showed that the general picture of launch decisions and their impact on the dependent variables was comparable across the total sample and both subsamples, indicating that heterogeneous samples in new product launch research may not cause major interpretation problems. Second, the analyses revealed that some launch decisions are more important in attaining new product success for consumer products than for industrial products, and vice versa. While these decisions do not lead to contradicting results in the samples, they show that some decisions may be especially relevant for only consumer or industrial products. We discuss research and managerial implications of the results.     

Perspective: The Innovation Dilemma: How to Innovate When the Market Is Mature

Most companies have ambitious growth goals. The trouble is there are only so many sources of market growth. Markets in many countries and industries are mature and increasingly commoditized; achieving growth in market share is expensive; and acquisitions often do not work. For most companies, product development means line extensions, improvements, and product modifications, and only serves to maintain market share. Markets aren't growing, so firms increasingly compete for a piece of a shrinking pie by introducing one insignificant new product after another. The launch of a truly differentiated new product in mature markets is rare these days. As a result, development portfolios have become decidedly less innovative since the mid‐1990s, and R&D productivity is down. The answer is bold innovation—breakthrough products, services and solutions that create growth engines for the future. This means larger‐scope and more systems‐oriented solutions and service packages. Examples such as Apple's iPod are often cited. (Note that Apple did not invent the MP3 player, nor was this opportunity in a blue ocean; in fact there were 43 competitors when Apple launched!) What Apple did succeed in was in identifying an attractive strategic arena (MP3s) where it could leverage its strengths to its advantage and then to develop a solution that solved users’ problems. The result—an easy‐to‐use, easy‐to‐download MP3 system, which also happened to be “cool.” Our benchmarking studies reveal that five vectors must be in place to undertake this type of innovation to yield bolder and more imaginative development projects. First, develop a bold innovation strategy that focuses your business on the right strategic arenas that promise to be engines of real growth. Most businesses focus their efforts in the wrong areas—on flat markets, mature technologies, and tired product categories. Break out of this box towards more promising strategic arenas with extreme opportunities. Next, foster a climate and culture that promotes bolder innovation. Leadership is vital to success. If senior management does not have the appetite for these big concepts, then all your efforts and systems will fail. Senior management plays a vital role here in promoting an innovative climate in your business. Next, create “big ideas” for integrated product‐service solutions. The best methods for generating breakthrough new product ideas are identified in this paper. Then drive these “big concepts” to market quickly via a systematic and disciplined idea‐to‐launch system designed for major innovation initiatives. Just because these projects are imaginative and bold is no reason to throw discipline out the window. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Finally build a solid business case and focus on the winners. Most innovation teams don't get the facts, and consequently build weak business cases; the result is that many worthwhile innovations don't get the support they need to be commercialized. It's essential to do the front‐end homework, and so build a compelling business case. Then make the right investment decisions—evaluating “big concepts” for development when little information is available. Note that financial models don't work well when it comes to evaluating major innovations, because the data are often wrong. But other methods can be used to make these tough go/kill decisions. Illustrations and examples are provided from many industries and companies to show how to implement these five vectors.     

Financial Incentives and Salesperson Time Orientation in New Product Launch: A Longitudinal Study

The success of a new product launch critically depends on an engaged and dedicated sales force. Salespeople who are involved in a new product launch must overcome significant uncertainty associated with the new product's performance, which can affect success expectations and, in turn, sales effort for the new product. Moreover, success expectations may drop in the first few months of the launch period, due to initial negative market feedback or general decline in sales force enthusiasm. Diminished expectations may start a vicious circle effect where lower success expectations for the new product lead to lower sales effort that, in turn, leads to lower performance, which further lowers expectations, and so on. Based on insights from attribution‐expectancy theory, this study investigates two distinct mechanisms to counteract the potential downward spiral in success expectations and sales effort devoted to a new product. Specifically, this research examines the role of financial incentives and salespersons' long‐term orientation in creating and maintaining high new product success expectations and sales effort during a new product launch. To investigate how the effect of these factors changes over time, success expectations and sales effort are examined across two critical points in time: the start of a new product launch and at completion of the first sales cycle. To test the model empirically, the North American sales force (n = 129) of a business unit of a global firm is surveyed longitudinally during the launch of a new line of industrial products. The data are analyzed using a partial least squares model. The results show that initial success expectations have a significant effect on sales effort later in the launch, and that this relationship is mediated by success expectations later in the launch. Success expectations and sales effort early in the launch are also shown to impact the perceived attractiveness of the financial incentives offered, but this does not translate into higher success expectations or sales effort at the end of the launch. In contrast, the long‐term orientation of salespersons is key to maintaining higher success expectations and sales effort at the end of the launch.     

The Role of Globalization, Time Acceleration, and Virtual Global Teams in Fostering Successful Global Product Launches

The present article presents a conceptualization of how firms can respond to the issues of globalization and time‐based competition through the use of virtual global teams to foster successful global product launches. It is argued that by combining input, managerial, and transformation‐based competencies effectively, the firm can configure a repertoire of strategic choices (e.g., marketing plans throughout the product development process) based on the national competitive environment, while at the same time being mindful of the need to maintain consistency within the firm's intermediaries operations—both in product development and global product launch. It is further argued that the linkages between globalization and time‐based competition necessitate managerial adjustments in decision frameworks to incorporate accelerated timescapes to maximize effectiveness in global product launch. In an effort to capture the varying impact of time on global decision makers a timescapes perspective is employed, where timescapes are analogous to landscapes because they include the temporal features of socioeconomic events in a variety of socially constructed contexts inclusive of timeframe, tempo, degree of path dependency, synchronization of events, sequence, anticipation, and ubiquity. The recognition of timescapes accentuates the contextual complexity of competition and creates the interface among events, environments, and individuals beyond the traditional numeric concept of clock time, thus requiring modification of a manager's decision‐making perspective. Further, it is argued that due to the rapid pace of globalization, many multinationals in their global product launches require that products, services, technical support, and prices throughout the world need to be coordinated. To effectively accomplish this goal of coordination as an accommodation, firms and their networks can form global virtual teams (i.e., culturally diverse, geographically dispersed, electronically communicating work group of members, who think and act in concert with the diversity of the global environment and intermediary needs–expectations) to enhance global product launch success. Lastly, it is argued that the hypercompetitive global marketplace cannot be managed ex post due to the level of cognitive complexity but must be managed ex ante by developing strategies capable of maintaining flexibility. To accomplish the task of competing in a hypercompetitive landscape, management must understand and incorporate a timescape of events that integrates the various perspectives of those involved in the global product development and launch decision‐making processes. Without a well‐articulated perspective of social time, managers will limit their ability to effectively coordinate global product development and launch across markets, thus hindering the firm's ability to maximize returns.