More and more firms are leveraging design as a resource to gain the upper hand in today's competitive business market. To this end, this study draws on the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm to examine the relationship between customer and supplier involvement in the design process and new product performance. The research also extends the RBV to a contingency lens by introducing product innovation capability (incremental and radical) as a moderator to draw the boundary conditions of the impact of customer/supplier involvement in design on new product performance. Using data collected from Canadian high‐tech companies, the findings provide strong support for the hypotheses in that customer involvement in design helps new product performance under high incremental innovation capability but harms new product performance under high radical innovation capability. In contrast, supplier involvement in design was beneficial to new product performance under both high incremental and radical innovation capability. The managerial implications for the role of design under different innovation capabilities are discussed.

The authors examine the influence of culture on the measurement of service quality and satisfaction in dentists’ office settings. Respondents from the United States, Canada, and Japan participated in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment in which the authors manipulated both expectations (high/low) and service performance (high/low) in a series of scenarios. With partial metric invariance, latent mean comparisons revealed that regardless of expectations, Japanese respondents reported lower quality perceptions and satisfaction ratings when performance was high and higher satisfaction ratings when performance was low than did their U.S. and Canadian counterparts. Thus, there is some evidence that Japanese consumers are more conservative in their evaluations of superior service but are less critical (or more forgiving) of inferior service. The authors also discuss managerial implications and future research directions.

Drawing on the learning and market orientation literature, this study examines how responsive and proactive market orientations interact with exploitative and exploratory learning to affect new product performance. Despite advancements in understanding the distinctions between the different types of learning and market orientations, little evidence exists regarding which types of market orientation work best with exploitative or exploratory learning to improve new product performance. Using a sample of 216 high-tech Canadian firms, the authors find that new product performance is elevated only when exploratory learning is bundled with proactive market orientation. New product performance suffered when exploratory learning was complemented with responsive market orientation and when exploitative learning was complemented with proactive market orientation. Implications for marketing theory and practice are discussed.

Perceived consumer risk is explored in relation to online (Internet) purchasing using a cross-national sample (N=562) from the United States, Canada and U.K. Objectives of the study are to determine if experience in online purchasing reduces perceived risk, if perceived risk varies across product/service categories and if certain types of risk are more important in purchasing certain products/services. Lastly, does national culture affect perceptions of risk? Results are discussed and suggestions are offered to managers on how to reduce perceived risk, thus increasing online purchasing in the three countries examined.

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