The Impact of Information Technology on New Product Development Performance

Abstract

Many managers expect a substantial impact of digitization on new product development (NPD) as it is an information‐intensive business process. Therefore, a better understanding of how information technology (IT) might improve the NPD process is important for both theory and practice. Drawing on the IT business value literature, this study develops a comprehensive conceptual model to investigate empirically how IT and non‐IT organizational antecedents translate into NPD IT capabilities and competences and how these are related with NPD performance. Based on survey data from German NPD managers, this study offers several insights. First, it shows that the development of superior NPD IT capabilities and competences depends on the ability to acquire and deploy suitable IT (i.e., firm‐level IT capabilities) and on appropriate strategic, structural, and cultural conditions ensured by a strong top management focus on NPD IT (i.e., executive champion for NPD IT). This study hence contributes empirical evidence to the NPD and the IT business value literature by expanding research on complementary resources. Second, this study addresses limitations regarding the conceptualization of NPD IT capabilities and their relationship with further sources of competitive advantage arising from NPD IT tool usage by considering both the effectiveness and the frequency of usage as well as the relationship between both. Third, this research updates the measurement of NPD IT tool usage effectiveness (i.e., IT leveraging competence) to account for technological developments. Moreover, this study reveals that the effectiveness of NPD IT tool usage is positively associated with NPD performance. It also highlights that the dissemination of IT tools does not directly increase NPD performance, but that NPD IT tool use frequency is an important antecedent of IT leveraging competence. For managers, this paper offers empirical evidence that firm‐wide IT capabilities and a focus on NPD IT are important predictors of NPD performance.

Use and Efficacy of Information Technology in Innovation Processes: The Specific Role of Servitization

“…Others report that the actual use frequency, instead of the mere existence of IT tools, drives performance (e.g., Marion, Reid, Hultink, and Barczak, ; Reid, Hultink, Marion, and Barczak, ). In this respect, clear responsibilities for IT tools and regular employee training promote IT use, which is associated with higher innovation project success (Mauerhoefer et al, ). Certain studies dealing with the market‐related aspects of IT tools in the innovation process's later stages demonstrate that they facilitate innovations' fit with the initial requirements (Durmuşoğlu and Barczak, ) and increase the market performance after market entry (Barczak et al, ).…”

“…Previous studies that investigated the performance relevance of IT could not find that IT had a direct or a generally valid positive effect on innovation performance. On the contrary, empirical evidence is more inclined to show that the effect is mediated through IT use frequency (Barczak, Sultan, and Hultink, ; Marion et al, ; Mauerhoefer, Strese, and Brettel, ); that it is dependent on the innovation development phase (Durmuşoğlu and Barczak, ; Marion et al, ); and that it is also dependent on organizational complementary assets, such as strategy and culture (e.g., Kawakami et al, ). These findings indicate that intermediate outcomes must be considered to better understand how IT tools affect innovation processes.…”

Digital innovations

“…In addition, there is a growing amount of studies on the enabling factors of digital innovations including newly emerging capabilities (Li et al 2018), cultural change (Hartl and Hess 2017), new forms of organizational structures such as digital infrastructures (Henfridsson and Bygstad 2013) or digital platforms (Gawer and Cusumano 2014;Karimi et al 2009;Yoo et al 2012), but also new ways of cooperation (e.g. co-design, co-creation, coproduction) (Mauerhoefer et al 2017;Nambisan et al 2017). A further research stream investigates the governance of digital innovations in organizations (Bharadwaj et al 2013;Hess and Barthel 2017;Kohli and Melville 2018;Nambisan et al 2017).…”

Conceptual Framework for Modeling the Agile Marketing Capability

“…Scholars stress the presence of many types of ITCs, such as: IT skills and competencies on IT field (Bhatt & Grover, 2005) as IS functional capabilities (Ainin et al, 2015); New Product Development IT capabilities (Addas & Pinsonneault, 2016;Mauerhoefer et al, 2017); operational absorptive capacity capabilities (Setia and Patel, 2013); big data analytics capabilities (Gupta and George, 2016) or systematic capabilities (Cao et al, 2016).…”