journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
Griffin, Abbie; Page, Albert L.
1996 The Journal of Product Innovation Management
doi: 10.1111/1540-5885.1360478
Success is not just elusive; it is also multifaceted and difficult to measure. A firm can assess the success or failure of a development project in any (or all) of many terms, including customer satisfaction, financial return, and technical advantage. To complicate matters, success may be measured not only at the level of the individual project, but also at the program level. With so many variables to consider and so many stakeholders involved, managers face a difficult challenge just deciding which measures are useful for measuring product development success. Recognizing that no single measure suffices for gauging the success of every product development project, Abbie Griffin and Albert L. Page hypothesize that the most appropriate set of measures for assessing project‐level success depends on the project strategy. For example, the objectives (and thus, the success criteria) for a new product that creates an entirely new market will differ from those of a project that extends an existing product line. Similarly, they hypothesize that the appropriate measures of a product development program's overall success depend on the firm's innovation strategy. For example, a firm that values being first to market will measure success in different terms from those used by a firm that focuses on maintaining a secure market niche. To test these hypotheses, product development professionals were presented with six project strategy scenarios and four business strategy scenarios. For each project strategy scenario, participants were asked to select the four most useful measures of project success. For each business strategy scenario, participants were asked to choose the set of four measures that would provide the most useful overall assessment of product development success. The responses strongly support the idea that the most appropriate measures of project‐level and program‐level success depend on the firm's project strategy and business strategy, respectively. For example, customer satisfaction and customer acceptance were among the most useful customer‐based measures of success for several project strategies, but market share was cited as the most useful customer‐based measure for projects involving new‐to‐the‐company products or line extensions. At the program level, firms with a business strategy that places little emphasis on innovation need to focus on measuring the efficiency of their product development program, while innovative firms need to assess the program's contribution to company growth.
Gupta, Ashok K.; Wilemon, David
1996 The Journal of Product Innovation Management
doi: 10.1111/1540-5885.1360497
A successful R&D manager is, in many ways, an agent of change. R&D managers must respond effectively to changes in domestic and global competition, product and process technologies, customer requirements, regulatory matters, and senior management's perception of the role R&D plays in a firm. The responses to these changes flow downstream from R&D to other parts of the organization, in the form of new materials, methods, processes, and products. To help us understand the changes facing R&D management, Ashok K. Gupta and David Wilemon present the results of a study that examines the ideas and experiences of 120 R&D directors from technology‐based companies. The study explores the major changes that R&D management has undergone in recent years, the changes R&D managers expect to encounter during the next few years, and the causes of those changes. The respondents also identify the skills and knowledge they view as necessary for effective R&D management, and they assess their organizations' capabilities in those areas. According to the respondents, major changes that R&D has encountered include increased emphasis on such issues as cross‐functional teamwork, R&D's contribution to both short‐ and long‐term business results, R&D's capability to quickly bring to market new products that customers value, efficient use of R&D resources, and R&D alliances. Other changes noted by respondents include greater pressure to find new markets, increased attention on the effective management of technical personnel, and increased regulations and sensitivity to environmental issues. The knowledge domains that the respondents highlighted as having the greatest effect on R&D performance include such capabilities as understanding customer needs, monitoring market developments, commercializing new technologies, building cross‐functional teams, managing multiple R&D projects, and accelerating new product development. According to the respondents, the largest gaps between required and current capabilities exist in several of the areas listed as being most important to effective R&D management, including monitoring market developments that can affect R&D activities and overall business performance, maintaining a spirit of inquiry while ensuring that R&D contributes to overall corporate performance, developing technology commercialization capabilities, fostering mutually profitable strategic alliances, and accelerating the development and commercialization of new products.
Olshavsky, Richard W.; Spreng, Richard A.
1996 The Journal of Product Innovation Management
doi: 10.1111/1540-5885.1360512
In their search for the keys to successful product innovation, product managers and researchers typically focus on trying to identify the most effective organizational processes, strategies, and structures. Surprisingly, little or no effort is directed toward understanding the process that consumers use for evaluating an innovation. By gaining insight into this evaluation process, a firm can present an innovative product in a more effective manner and thus increase the likelihood that consumers will respond favorably to the innovation. Richard W. Olshavsky and Richard A. Spreng provide insight into this process by describing the results of an experiment in which subjects were asked to evaluate several innovative concepts. From their observations, they develop a model of the detailed information‐processing steps that these consumers employed in order to evaluate the new products. Consistent with previous research, they found that judgment was the predominant evaluation strategy, particularly for the most innovative concepts. Various subjects also used a categorization strategy, though none used categorization for more than four of the nine concepts that were evaluated. Contrary to expectations, none of the evaluations relied solely on the manufacturer's reputation or the recommendation of a friend. In a simplified model of the evaluation process, when presented with an innovative concept, consumers first attempt to categorize the product. In other words, an innovation may be rejected simply because consumers somehow link it to an existing category that has a negative connotation. If consumers cannot categorize the product, they then employ a judgment process based on some evaluative criteria. Based on the data collected in this study, this simplified model is extended to include four other cognitive processes that strongly influence the evaluation process: forming evaluative criteria, forming expectations about the innovative concept, assessing satisfaction with an old product, and comparing the new and old products. When faced with a highly innovative concept, consumers may find it difficult to form their own evaluative criteria and expectations concerning that innovation. Consequently, managers may have an opportunity to shape the judgment process by educating consumers about the appropriate evaluative criteria or by clearly communicating the product's attributes, benefits, and appropriate use.
Mishra, Sanjay; Kim, Dongwook; Lee, Dae Hoon
1996 The Journal of Product Innovation Management
doi: 10.1111/1540-5885.1360530
Although considerable effort has been devoted to identifying the factors that contribute to new product success and failure, plenty of work remains to be done in this area. For example, many studies of this subject focus on companies in specific parts of the world (in particular, North America, Europe, and Japan). It remains to be seen whether the findings from these studies apply to the new product development (NPD) efforts of companies in other regions, let alone on a global basis. Sanjay Mishra, Dongwook Kim, and Dae Hoon Lee address this issue in a study of the factors that contribute to the success or failure of NPD efforts in South Korean firms. To explore the question of whether a global set of success factors can be identified, they compare their findings with those of similar studies conducted in Canada and China. Classifying these countries in terms of stages of economic development (with China and Canada at opposite extremes and Korea in the middle), they expect to find the greatest dissimilarities in their comparisons of China and Canada. Marketing managers from 144 Korean firms provided in formation about 288 successful and unsuccessful products. Their responses indicate that the factors most closely related to new product outcomes in Korea are market intelligence, product‐firm compatibility, the nature of the new product idea (for example, whether the product idea was market derived, whether the product specifications were clearly defined by the marketplace), launch effort, and general characteristics of the new product venture (such as the product's innovativeness to the market and its technical complexity). Several of these factors were emphasized in studies of Canadian and Chinese NPD success, though respondents to those studies also highlighted the importance of the product offering and proficiency of formal NPD activities. Contrary to expectations, China and Canada show the greatest similarity among the three countries studied, in terms of the relative importance of the various NPD success factors. On the other hand, China and Korea are more similar in terms of the effects of the variables studied. In other words, if a variable is related to new product failure in Korea, that variable is most likely also related to failure in China. Although some similarities are evident among all three countries, the findings in this study do not point toward a single, global formula for NPD success.
Showing 1 to 7 of 7 Articles