Internationalization, product development and performance outcomes: A comparative study of 10 countries

Product development is recognized as innovative value creating effort that has become important in the high-risk, globally competitive environment. This paper presents a model that links product development practices with product development performance in the context of internationalization. The empirical results base the analyses on International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS IV) data from 10 countries (i.e., Argentina, China, Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey and USA). We develop several hypotheses with respect to the relationships between product development practices and their outcome measures. We test the hypotheses with data from 458 manufacturing units. This study suggests that many small and medium sized firms adopt internationalization as their new competitive weapon. Small firms seem to be more effective in utilizing product design and manufacturing involvement while large firms standardize and formalize the product development practices. Both small and large firms utilize cross-functional work for achieving organizational and technological integration. The improvement efforts toward enhancing product development outcomes vary depending on different regions of the world.