The Impact of Market Orientation on Customer Knowledge Development and NPD Success

Abstract

The ability to develop and understand customer new product preferences in response to changing market trends is shown to be as a key to new product success. Given the significance of developing customer preferences and the increasing use of cross-functional new product teams in the NPD process, the authors examine how customer knowledge development is affected by characteristics of cross-functional new product teams in a market-oriented organizational context. On the basis of a study of 228 new product project managers in the R&D or marketing area, the authors find that customer knowledge development is positively influenced by customer orientation, competitor orientation, and cross-functional integration. Interestingly, lead users' involvement has a positive quadratic effect on customer knowledge development in terms of marketing respondents. However, cross-functional integration weakens the positive effects of both customer orientation and competitor orientation on customer knowledge development. Our results also reveal a clear R&D–marketing split on the main effect of the proposed antecedents.

Market orientation and product innovation: the mediating role of technological capability

“…In this respect, the inferences drawn from these relationships according to business characteristics can contribute to the literature. Furthermore, this study has contributed valuable information to discussions about the positive (Hurley and Hult, 1998;Hooley et al, 2000;Baker and Sinkula, 2005;Chang et al, 2010) or negative effects (Macdonald, 1995;Frosch, 1996;Berthon et al, 2004) of market orientation on product innovation by showing that in the case of the manufacturing firms EJIM 24,4 sampled in this study, market orientation has a positive effect. Moreover, this study has found that making optimal use of market orientation and focusing on organizational factors (Augusto and Coelho, 2009), like technological capability, are important for product innovation success.…”

“…Studies on the factors affecting market orientation have found that factors such as senior management, interdepartmental relations, organizational structure, culture and others affected market orientation (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993;Kirca et al, 2005;Matsuno et al, 2005). Other studies have examined the mediating role of innovativeness (Zhang and Duan, 2010), product quality, innovation speed (Rodr ıguez-Pinto et al, 2011), customer knowledge development (Chang et al, 2010), R&D effectiveness (De Luca et al, 2010), new product performance (Ledwith and O'Dwyer, 2009), learning style and innovation priority (Baker and Sinkula, 2007), learning orientation and Market orientation and product innovation organizational innovativeness (Dursun and Kilic, 2015) on the effect of market orientation on product innovation. This study examines the mediating role of technological capability in the effect of market orientation on product innovation.…”

“…Customers have similar perceptions and perspectives regarding their needs; therefore, real innovations need to focus on going beyond customers' usual experiences (Bennett and Cooper, 1981) and to redefine existing problems (Frosch, 1996;Berthon, et al, 2004). In addition, market orientation affects product innovation positively by contributing to obtaining market knowledge from the external environment, understanding customer preferences, responding to market trends (Chang et al, 2010) and engaging in product development, design and differentiation in line with market needs (Hooley et al, 2000). The disagreements in study results have prompted researchers to investigate how other organizational factors could possibly affect the relationship between market orientation and product innovation (Augusto and Coelho, 2009).…”

Development of market-oriented strategies through cross-functional integration in the context of the food and beverage industry

“…The elements present in CFI processes are: boundary spanning activities, integration factors, formality/informality, level of integration, and impacts of integration (Pimenta et al, 2016). Studies on CFI focus on several research themes, such as: 1) boundary spanning activities (Silva et al, 2013), integration between specific functions, e. and vice versa: papers focused on MO put emphasis on other antecedents other than CFI (e.g., Jaworski and Kohli, 1993;Chang, Chen, Lin, and Chiu, 2010;Hernández-Linares et al, 2020).…”

“…Im and Nakata, 2008; Wei and Atuahene-Gima, 2009); and vice versa: papers focused on MO put emphasis on other antecedents other than CFI (e.g. Jaworski and Kohli, 1993; Chang et al , 2010; Hernández-Linares et al , 2020). Therefore, it is possible to see that literature places little emphasis on the operational and technical aspects of integration as an antecedent of MO.…”