No abstract

By breaking down the walls among the R&D, manufacturing, and marketing functions, techniques such as concurrent engineering and quality function deployment can pave the way to more effective new product development (NPD). Recognizing the benefits of such cross‐functional efforts, practitioners and researchers have examined the interrelationships among various groups in the NPD process, paying particularly close attention to the R&D–marketing interface. However, manufacturing also plays an important role in NPD. Consequently, any thorough exploration of the relationship between cross‐functional cooperation and NPD success must consider manufacturing's perspective. X. Michael Song, Mitzi M. Montoya‐Weiss, and Jeffrey B. Schmidt provide such a balanced perspective in a study of cross‐functional cooperation during NPD in Mexican high‐tech firms. Notwithstanding the differing functional goals, objectives, and reward systems present in R&D, manufacturing and marketing, they hypothesize that all three functions recognize that successful NPD requires crossfunctional cooperation. In particular, they expect that representatives of these three functional groups will share similar perceptions, regarding both the drivers and the consequences of cross‐functional cooperation. The survey results support the hypothesis that R&D, manufacturing, and marketing professionals share the same perceptions, regarding the drivers and the consequences of cross‐functional cooperation. Respondents from all three groups view internal facilitators as the drivers of cross‐functional cooperation. In other words, regardless of their functional area, the survey respondents believe that the strongest, most direct effects on cross‐functional cooperation and NPD performance come from a firm's evaluation criteria, reward structures, and management expectations. Respondents perceive these internal facilitators as having a greater effect on cross‐functional cooperation than that of external forces such as market competitiveness and technological change. In fact, contrary to expectations, the respondents do not view these external forces as having a significant effect on cross‐functional cooperation or NPD performance. And contrary to persistent reports about friction between technical and nontechnical personnel, all three groups perceive a strong, positive relationship between cross‐functional communication and NPD performance.

While the new product literature suggests that managerially controllable factors most strongly affect new product success, few studies have examined how these factors differ across countries. The objectives of this article are: (1) to develop a model of factors associated with new product success, (2) to directly compare the factors that managers perceive to be associated with new product success in the United States and China, and (3) to demonstrate the application of various statistical analyses for increasing the confidence that may be placed in empirical findings and outline methods for assessing whether significant estimation biases exist in cross-sectional data. Our paper should be of interest to new product researchers and international comparative marketing researchers. The implications of our results should also be of considerable value and interest to executives faced with the complex task of selecting and managing new product development projects as well as to those firms experiencing international competition. To accomplish our objectives, we develop a model of managerially controllable factors related to new product success, which includes variables related to the organization, the new product development process, and the product itself. The model is tested using data collected on 142 new products launched in the United States and 470 new products launched in China. We conduct case studies to examine the appropriateness of the data collection methods, to establish the content validity of the concepts, and to assess the usefulness of the measures and constructs in a Chinese context. The model was tested using EQS with covariance matrices as input. We tested the measurement model before assessing the structural relationships. Once the measurement issues were satisfactorily resolved, the structural model was tested for each country individually. Since the results of the individual models for the United States and China were satisfactory, we performed a two-group simultaneous path analysis in order to test for similarities and differences in the factors of new product success between the United States and China. We tested whether or not the path coefficients were invariant across the two countries using a Lagrangian Multiplier test. The challenge for all cross-sectional studies is to reject the hypothesis that many of the parameters associated with the dependent variable are biased by “omitted” firm level effects and other specification errors. We examine these possible biases within the structural equations framework by examining the robustness of the parameters with and without the measurement error interactions fixed and an examination of nominological validity for each country. In addition, since we collected two observations per firm in our Chinese sample, we also examine whether bias exists due to omitted firm effects by comparing within and between estimates. The stability of the within and between estimates also suggests that our findings are robust to omitted firm effects. Our findings provide i...

Although periodic review is a prominent feature of new product development (NPD) processes, important questions about how managers make critical continuation/termination decisions in risky NPDprojects remain unanswered. The authors test whether factors unrelated to a new product’s forecasted performance cause managers to continue NPDprojects into subsequent stages of development at rapidly accelerating costs. The results show that managers who initiate a project are less likely to perceive it is failing, are more committed to it, and are more likely to continue funding it than managers who assume leadership after a project is started. There is also the tendency toward increased commitment for more innovative products compared with less innovative ones. The results suggest that simply giving managers better information will not necessarily lead to better decisions. Finally, the results show that escalation of commitment is a more serious problem during NPDthan after the product is commercialized.

No abstract