New service development (NSD) is a growing innovation discipline. Despite the growth of articles about NSD, several authors have criticized the lack of attention paid to NSD, compared with new ...product development (NPD), and the lack of consensus across NSD findings. At the same time, others have proclaimed that NSD is a sophisticated, mature field of research. This paper tries to resolve these issues by analyzing 230 empirical articles on NSD, published over a period of 30 years. It investigates the content of NSD research articles, the authors contributing to the field, and the research methodologies employed. It finds that, despite its growing popularity, the field has not moved forward substantively. NSD is a subject specialty but lacks an “invisible college” of researchers addressing the topic. This has resulted in a body of research that fails to provide managers with consistent answers to basic questions about how to most effectively manage NSD processes.
One of the main causes for the lack of coherence in the knowledge on this topic may stem from the fact that, rather than initially approaching research in the domain without ingoing bias and using grounded theory approaches to create initial understanding, many of the early researchers applied the concepts, frameworks, and methods used to understand NPD to the NSD domain. To correct this problem, it is proposed that the field of NSD needs to move forward in a significantly different manner. This paper provides several recommendations for attracting more academics to the field, elevating the visibility and status of NSD as a research domain, and also presents a research agenda that may help reorient future research in this area so that a more complete and coherent body of knowledge is generated that both advances the field and helps practitioners manage NSD more effectively and efficiently.
Although various manufacturing companies have developed into total solution providers, no research addresses their service orientations. Building on the literature on organizational service climate, ...this study explores the organizational parameters and service business orientations that explain relative product sales and service volume of manufacturing companies. Following an exploratory study involving in-depth interviews, the authors conducted an empirical survey of 137 companies in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark. The study assesses the effects of organizational parameters on the implementation of service business orientations and validates the important distinction between services in support of the client’s actions (SSC) and services in the support of the product (SSP). The findings demonstrate that services in support of the client’s action leverage relative product sales, while services in support of the product generate service volume. In addition to the main effects, the moderating effects of the organizational parameters are discussed.
The purpose of this article is to explain why salespeople adopt information technology. The results from a cross-sectional study of 229 salespeople indicate that putting sales technology to use ...strongly depends on salespeople's perceptions about the technology enhancing their performance, their personal innovativeness and organizational efforts in terms of user training. Throughout the adoption process companies also need to target sales line managers–next to end users–because salespeople clearly comply with the expectations of their supervisors. Finally, the threat from competing sales professionals or peers who use similar sales technology seems to be of secondary importance for individual sales technology adoption.
Reducing the physical distance among R&D engineers and between R&D and marketing is widely believed to result in more frequent communication, and hence higher product development performance. ...However, the empirical evidence for the effect of co-location on communication frequency is problematic for two reasons: (1) the evidence often features either little contextual realism or doubtful internal validity, and (2) the analysis does not deal with the statistical problems typical of network data. Our study avoids the first problem by using sequential network data collected from a quasi-experiment at an industrial company that regrouped its R&D teams into a new facility. We avoid the second problem by using Wasserman and Iacobucci's (1988) method for the statistical analysis of sequential network data. Our results show that communication among R&D teams was enhanced after co-locating these teams. Surprisingly, communication frequency between R&D and marketing was not affected by the increased physical distance. This may suggest that business procedures accompanying the relocation prevented a widening gap between R&D and marketing. Alternatively, it may indicate that the effect of co-location depends on the content and medium of the communication flows.
The objective of this exploratory study is to add to our understanding of ongoing product design decision‐making to reduce eventual decision‐making bias. Six research questions are formulated with ...the aim to establish if and how functional membership and informal patterns of communication within an organization influence whether and why employees are willing to engage in product design modifications. We selected as a field site for our study an industrial company that had an internal research and product development operations and where the employees were located on the same site. A three‐step approach within the manufacturing case company was designed: (1) In‐depth interviews were carried out with managers and employees; (2) a survey questionnaire was sent out to all employees involved with a specific product that is subject to potential design modifications; and (3) a post hoc group feedback session was organized to further discuss our findings with the management. First, analysis of the nine in‐depth interviews establishes a taxonomy of product design decisions involving four types of criteria; product‐related, service‐related, market‐related, and feasibility‐related criteria explain why employees would engage or not in product design modifications. Second, it is demonstrated that functional membership has a significant influence on the concern for these decision‐making criteria as well as on the decision to proceed or not with product design modifications. In other words, functional membership influences whether and why employees are more or less willing to make product design modifications. In this manufacturing company, a global industrial player, the differences in concern appear especially for service‐ and market‐related criteria and pertain particularly to the research and development (R&D) and service function. Overall, even though the perceived performance of the specific product under study did not differ significantly among the different departments, it is observed that R&D employees were significantly less in favor of proceeding with product design modifications than other employees were. Third, using UCINET VI software, we provide some explanations for this finding. It is shown that informal patterns of communication (i.e., employee degree centrality) operate a situational opportunity to make modifications to an existing product and a cognitive opportunity influencing the decision to modify product design following an inverted U‐shaped function. Ultimately, we derive practical guidelines for an ideal product–team composition to reduce product design decision‐making bias.
This research attempts to (1) identify the factors that influence strategic decision making (i.e., a choice made among various strategic options), and (2) establish their relative importance in the ...context of new product development. Hence, this study's research question is formulated as follows: from a descriptive perspective what factors prevail in managers' strategic decision making on new product development, and from a normative perspective is this behavior optimal? An exploratory case research study generated a four‐dimensional framework of strategic decision making. In 17 companies, the decision‐making processes and subsequent implementation of 22 business innovation projects were studied. Managers' choices are determined by the assessment of (1) the business opportunity, (2) the feasibility, (3) the competitiveness, and (4) the leverage opportunities provided by the strategic option. The research question was then further addressed in a field site survey of 144 managers of ChemCorp, a global, multidivisional chemicals company. The ex ante conjoint study shows that feasibility and business opportunity prevail over competitiveness and leverage at the decision‐making moment. Using PLS‐Graph revealed that a manager's idiosyncrasies and the current and the future context of the division to which they belonged barely affected the relative weight of the decision‐making criteria: only the division's customer power and the threat of new entrants significantly influence positively the support for business opportunity assessments. This raised an important question: if feasibility and business opportunity appear as being, overall, the two most important strategic decision‐making criteria ex ante, are they key differentiators between success and failure ex post? An ex post critical incident study was conducted on 75 successful innovations and 69 failed innovations reported by the ChemCorp respondents. Using PLS‐Graph, this study shows that the competitiveness of a strategic option is a very important predictor of new project success. While the findings await replication in other industries (e.g., industries of a less capital‐intensive nature), they are intriguing: strategic innovation decision making may be off track when reality is accounted for.
Recently, we have witnessed a strong growth in the internationalization of many firms’ product development activities. However, the lack of attention devoted by scientific research to the management ...of international innovation contrasts sharply with the importance attached to it as a cornerstone of international business success. Although several empirical studies and normative theories have specified the communication requirements in innovation teams, an empirically based insight is definitely needed on the communication requirements and requirements that prevail in the complex context of international innovation teams, in which the participants are located in different company units, countries, and cultures.
This article addresses the following research question: viewing international innovation as an interfunctional activity, what are the communication requirements an international innovation team is facing, and what are the communication capabilities (interface mechanisms) that may be adopted to initiate, develop, and launch the new product effectively and efficiently? An extensive case study research project was designed to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework. Over a two year time period, the research team has investigated selected innovation projects in four European multinational corporations.
The analysis of the case study data suggests five requirements that determine the effectiveness and efficiency of communication in international product development teams: network transparency, knowledge codification, knowledge credibility, communication cost, secrecy. To cope with these communication requirements, organizations may create firm level capabilities (parallel structures, cross-functional and inter-unit climate, communication infrastructure, goal congruence) and team level capabilities (core team, team leadership, formalization, procedural justice). The evidence from the in-depth case study research indicates that these mechanisms provide a parsimonious and powerful approach to address the communication requirements in international product innovation teams. After the information processing framework proposed by Tushman and Nadler
124, the adoption of these mechanisms is expected to improve innovation effectiveness.
This holds important consequences for the management of international product innovation projects. First, the innovating firm must balance centralization and decentralization, employ formal as well as informal strategies, and integrate ad-hoc and permanent strategies. Second, it highlights the critical role of the project leader. Given the fact that companies often select the most available person, rather than the best person for the job, the allocation of light weight project leaders may create heavyweight problems in international teams. Third, following the argument in favor of procedural justice, the absence of involvement may severely hinder cross-functional commitment to international innovation projects. Fourth, the innovating firm must also actively manage the communication flows with external parties. Failure to do so may result in flawed specifications, and a limited understanding about product design and market strategies.
The aim of this study is to identify the organizational and communication antecedents, and evaluate the consequences on relative product and service characteristics, of the use of service-sourced ...information by product designers during new product development. An empirical study of 121 product design managers demonstrates that a firm’s market orientation is improved by a healthy working relationship between product designers and service employees. Such a relationship motivates designers to use service-sourced information disseminated to them, enhancing both product and service characteristics of the new offering. The authors discuss how communication channels and information content affect the information use of product designers. Product designers value written information most. Information use does not relate to the frequency of receiving verbal or electronic information. Information about product ergonomics positively influences product designers’ perceptions of the information, whereas information on product aesthetics negatively influences their perceptions.
The objective of the present study was to develop a comprehensive empirically-based model of the communication interface between R&D and marketing. Following Moenaert and Souder (Moenaert, R. K., ...Souder, W. E. 1990. An analysis of the use of extra-functional information by marketing and R&D personnel review and model. Product Innovation Management 7 (3, September) 213–229.), a causal model of the antecedents of information utility at the R&D/marketing-interface was postulated. A non-experimental critical incident method was used to test the model. The field survey involved 386 team members of 80 new product innovation teams in 40 companies. Path analysis was used to test the causal model. Support for several aspects of the model were found. First, the relevance and the credibility of the message had strong effects on the perception of information utility. The comprehensibility of the message had a moderate effect on the perception of information utility, whereas novelty had a small effect. Second, the quality of the relationship, the seniority and the prior experience of the message source, and the type of communication channel used had significant effects on the perception of the message. The implications of the research results for managers and researchers are detailed.
This article theoretically and empirically examines the antecedents and consequences of project communication during the new financial service innovation process. The authors analyze project ...communication comprising both intraproject communication and extraproject communication (i.e., boundary spanners) and adopt the view that project teams within banks are primarily information-processing systems directed toward reducing innovative uncertainty. The research findings indicate that the level of complexity contributes to intraproject communication, whereas centralized project environments appear to be a barrier for communication within the project team. Curvilinear relationships (inverted U) are substantiated between project climate and intraproject communication and between formalization and boundary-spanning communication. The authors’ findings provide support for the fact that effective project communication is contingent upon the level of cross-functional cooperation and that the relationship with project success is an indirect one, mediated by the level of innovative uncertainty reduction.
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