The continuous development and market introduction of new products can be an important determinant of sustained company performance. For approximately 30 years, conceptual and empirical research has been undertaken to identify the critical success factors of new products. This paper reviews the findings of empirical work into the success factors of new product development (NPD). It is the prime objective of this work to summarize the most important findings in a compact and structured way. In addition, shortcomings of previous empirical work on NPD success factors will be discussed and suggestions for improvement in future empirical NPD studies will be made.

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Prior research has identified the integration of marketing with research and development (R&D) as a key success factor for new product development (NPD). However, prior work has not distinguished the sales and marketing functions, even though they are distinctive departments within an organization. Therefore, the authors extend prior research and examine the effect of cross-functional cooperation among sales, marketing, and R&D on NPD performance across multiple stages of the NPD process. The authors use multiple-informant data from 424 sales, marketing, and R&D managers as well as project leaders of 106 NPD projects to test several hypotheses. The results show that the cooperation between sales and R&D and between sales and marketing has a significant, positive effect on overall NPD project performance beyond marketing-R&D cooperation. The authors also find that the effect of cross-functional cooperation among sales, marketing, and R&D on overall NPD project performance varies across stages of the NPD process. More specifically, the authors find that sales-R&D cooperation in the concept and product development stages is critical for greater new product success. Sales-marketing cooperation is important in the concept development stage but has surprisingly less impact in the implementation stage.