دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 2750
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

نقش تامین کننده در توسعه محصول جدید و نوآوری :با در نظر گرفتن سهام و نگاه به آینده

عنوان انگلیسی
Supplier involvement in new product development and innovation: Taking stock and looking to the future
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
2750 2009 11 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 187–197

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
- مشارکت تامین کننده - توسعه محصول جدید - روابط عرضه کننده -
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
Supplier involvement,New product development,Supplier relationships,
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  نقش تامین کننده در توسعه محصول جدید و نوآوری :با در نظر گرفتن سهام و نگاه به آینده

چکیده انگلیسی

This paper provides a comprehensive and critical review and synthesis of the current state of empirical research into supplier involvement in new product development (NPD). The paper begins by defining supplier involvement in NPD and evaluating the rationale for supplier involvement in NPD. This suggests that early and extensive supplier involvement in NPD projects has the potential to improve NPD effectiveness and efficiency, however, existing research remains fragmented and empirical findings to date show conflicting results. The paper takes stock of the research on supplier involvement in NPD, tracing the origins of the literature to the late 1980s, and evaluating the development of the field up to the present day. From this broad base of empirical research the analysis identifies a set of factors affecting the success of supplier involvement projects. The paper concludes with a discussion of two emerging themes: (1) supplier relationship development and adaptation; (2) supply network involvement in product innovation.

مقدمه انگلیسی

As more and more companies are outsourcing parts of their new product development (NPD) activities to suppliers, it is not surprising to find that research into how to manage supplier involvement in NPD and innovation has greatly expanded during the last 30 years. Several definitions of supplier involvement in NPD have been suggested; fundamentally it concerns the integration of the capabilities that suppliers can contribute to NPD projects (Dowlatshahi, 1998), the tasks they are able to carry out on behalf of the customer, and the responsibilities they assume for the development of a part, process or service (Van Echtelt et al., 2008, p. 182). Supplier involvement in NPD is important, therefore, because suppliers possess specialized product and process capabilities, which are critical as products are becoming increasingly complex. Indeed there is much evidence to suggest that involving suppliers extensively and early in NPD can improve NPD performance in terms of reduced costs and time to market and improved quality (e.g. Ragatz et al., 2002), and it has been used as a key factor in explaining the ‘Japanese advantage’ (e.g. Clark, 1989). However, despite the apparent benefits of supplier involvement in NPD, research remains fragmented. Although there is a substantial body of research emerging in this field using a range of different research methodologies, empirical findings regarding performance benefits differ quite significantly. There are also uncertainties as to the situations in which supplier involvement will reap the expected benefits. For example, supplier involvement in products of high technological uncertainty, i.e. radical innovation has been investigated by several authors, but the results are contradictory. Furthermore, although research has increasingly investigated the conditions for successful supplier involvement, there is still a lack of consensus as to what makes for successful long-term supplier involvement efforts. This paper seeks to provide a rigorous and critical analysis of the state-of-the-art empirical research on supplier involvement in NPD. To ensure that only the highest quality research is considered, the analysis focuses specifically on articles published in major English-language North American and European journals. This means that the analysis considers mainly journal articles that are included as ‘four stars’ on the latest Association of Business Schools (ABS) ranking (Harvey et al., 2008) plus a few seminal journal articles and contributions that are widely accepted as having provided major contributions to the field. The ABS ranking draws from several other highly regarded journal quality rankings; journal articles ranked as four stars represent the highest tier of business and management journals and include top journals such as Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal. These journals tend to have a high citation impact factor (measured by the Institute for Scientific Information—ISI) of at least 2.0. Although any journal ranking is inevitably controversial, the ABS ranking is widely viewed as providing a reliable measure of research rigour and quality. The implications of focusing on these particular journals are discussed at the end of the paper.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

The review of approximately three decades of research into supplier involvement in NPD shows that the field has strong roots in Japanese automotive research, but that there is also an upsurge in cross-industry and cross-country research. Research methods include in-depth case studies and, increasingly, large-scale surveys. Although the majority of research is based on the responses from (and thus perceptions of) single customer companies, there have been some attempts to gather data from both customers and suppliers. The total picture is one of overwhelming evidence to support early and extensive supplier involvement as a key explanatory factor of superior new product performance in terms of cost, quality, and time to market benefits. Nevertheless, research also shows that major management challenges exist, including a need for internal coordination, advanced supplier selection processes, and long-term relationship adaptation to create supplier relationships with high levels of trust and commitment. The extensive amount of rigorous research that has been conducted to date enables us to synthesize the research findings into a model of factors affecting the success of supplier involvement in NPD (see Fig. 1). This model integrates the findings from a range of contexts investigated through both in-depth qualitative and large-scale quantitative research methods. The extensive list of success factors are organized into three main groups: (1) supplier selection; (2) supplier relationship development and adaptation; and (3) internal customer capabilities. Divided into these three main groups, the model highlights the factors that have been identified as impacting on performance measured by shorter time to market, improved product quality, and reduced development and product costs. The first factor concerns supplier selection processes. The need for early involvement is supported by much of the research discussed in this paper (e.g. Bidault et al., 1998; Takeishi, 2001), and this implies involvement at the concept stage or during early feasibility studies. However, it is not a question of involving all suppliers earlier—but the right suppliers. Suppliers to be involved early include suppliers of parts representing high value and complexity and these suppliers either take on a full black box or grey box responsibility (e.g. Clark and Fujimoto, 1991; Kamath and Liker, 1994). These in turn need to be selected and evaluated according to their innovative capability and complementarity (Hartley et al., 1997; Petersen et al., 2005). The second factor is the need for supplier relationship development and adaptation. This includes a range of factors that concern the long-term process of integration between customers and suppliers, such as shared training (Ragatz et al., 1997), mutual trust, and commitment (LaBahn and Krapfel, 2000; Walter, 2003; Song and Benedetto, 2008), risk and reward sharing (Ragatz et al., 1997), agreed performance targets and measures (Petersen et al., 2005; Van Echtelt et al., 2008), and supplier representation on the customer's NPD team (Imai et al., 1985; Ragatz et al., 1997; Petersen et al., 2003). These relationship-specific factors are frequently underestimated by managers, but have been identified as critical across the range of studies examined in this paper. The third factor involves the internal capabilities of the customer. Research has emphasized two internal factors in particular: top management commitment (Ragatz et al., 1997) and internal cross-functional coordination (Takeishi, 2001; Hillebrand and Biemans, 2004). The need to consider internal factors within the customer company suggests that the ability to manage supplier relationships begins by developing the ability to manage internal cross-functional relationships. Internal customer processes need to be developed to ensure that suppliers are selected and evaluated on the right basis and ongoing trusting and committed supplier relationships are allowed to evolve. 3.1. Future research directions Two themes seem likely to attract future research. The first theme is the need to develop a better understanding of the characteristics of supplier relationships and their industrial and cultural context. This theme arises partly as a consequence of the bias towards mature high-volume industries, especially the automotive industry. High profile research, i.e. studies that appear in the most highly ranked international journals, remains predominantly Japan and US-centric. The bias is partly due to the characteristics of these particular journals. However, many European-based journals, including the Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management, naturally publish a high proportion of non-US and Japanese studies. Globally, the fact is that the most influential studies (e.g. measured according to ISI impact), maintain many of the assumptions of high volume production. Thus, most research still focuses on large powerful customers and their less powerful suppliers. There is a need to develop a greater understanding of the characteristics and management of ongoing supplier relationships within and between supplier involvement projects (Van Echtelt et al., 2008). The second theme concerns the question of supplier involvement in radical innovation projects. A real question mark remains over the modifying effect of technological uncertainty. That is, some research suggests that a high degree of innovation in NPD projects may indicate that supplier involvement is particularly important, whereas other research indicates that supplier involvement becomes less important in comparison with other forms of inter-organizational relationships. In the following concluding sections these emerging research themes are discussed in more detail. 3.2. Supplier relationship development and management As most research to date has adopted the perspective of large powerful manufacturers it tends to assume that suppliers are willing to invest in—and commit to—the customer's demanding NPD projects. A relatively small body of marketing-based research (e.g. LaBahn and Krapfel, 2000; Walter, 2003) has investigated supplier involvement from a supplier perspective, revealing a number of supplier concerns, such as customer exploitation of power, and supplier unwillingness to partner with customers during NPD. There is evidence to suggest that powerful customers, who abuse their power advantage and behave opportunistically, may ruin the trust that is a critical ingredient in supplier involvement projects. As much research points to the importance of developing and managing the buyer–supplier relationship as part of the ongoing supplier involvement process (Fig. 1), there is clearly a need to further explore supplier perspectives. Research also suggests that successful supplier involvement requires customers to qualify and evaluate supplier capabilities, especially in terms of complementarity of capabilities and culture (e.g. Petersen et al., 2005). Moreover, suppliers need to agree technical metrics and targets in order to ensure long-term commitment (Petersen et al., 2005). Overall, supplier relationships need careful nurturing for supplier involvement benefits to materialize: trust takes a long time to develop but an instant to destroy through opportunistic behaviour. 3.3. Supply network involvement in product innovation Early research into supplier involvement in NPD focused on incremental NPD. More recently, there has been a stream of research focusing on the role of technology uncertainty and projects characterized by radical innovation (Song and Parry, 1999; Ragatz et al., 2002; Song and Benedetto, 2008). Some research (e.g. Petersen et al., 2005) suggests that technological uncertainty may further necessitate the need for supplier participation on the customer's NPD team. Other research (e.g. Primo and Amundson, 2002), however, has found the opposite that existing suppliers may be less important than new suppliers under conditions of technological uncertainty, i.e. radical innovation. Fig. 2 provides a synthesis of supplier involvement benefits in relation to levels of technological uncertainty. The horizontal dimension is usually measured by impacts on cost, quality and time to market, although some studies go further to analyze impacts on sales growth (Song and Benedetto, 2008) and return on investment (Petersen et al., 2005). The vertical dimension depicts the two extremes of technological uncertainty, or level of innovation. Much recent research in particular has concerned whether supplier involvement benefits can still be expected in situations of high technological uncertainty and the factors that can help to ensure that supplier involvement can also be beneficial in such difficult circumstances. The close occupation of the bottom right hand corner of Fig. 2 indicates the large bulk of research that has provided evidence in favour of supplier involvement under conditions of low technological uncertainty, i.e. typically incremental NPD projects. In comparison, there is little research showing no benefits from supplier involvement under conditions of low technological uncertainty (Hartley et al., 1997). One likely explanation may be that companies are simply improving their supplier involvement efforts and thus more likely to reap the benefits. Conditions of high technological uncertainty have caused concern for conflicting results and debate. Eisenhardt and Tabrizi originally raised the point and called for caution in extending the assumption of supplier involvement benefits from technological predictability to conditions of technological unpredictability. Swink (1999) and Primo and Amundson (2002) have later supported this concern. Nevertheless, contradictory results have been published, especially by Ragatz et al. (2002) and Petersen et al. (2003), suggesting that technological uncertainty calls for careful supplier integration of suppliers on customer NPD teams. Wasti and Liker (1997) and Song and Benedetto (2008) share some of these views, emphasizing the particular need for supplier technical capabilities and supplier qualification and investment (high asset specificity) when companies are dealing with radical innovation projects. Focusing on the role of suppliers in discontinuous innovation (very high technological uncertainty), Phillips et al. (2006) take this one step further by suggesting that existing direct suppliers may be redundant, as new complementary capabilities and technologies from outside the existing supply chain are required. They suggest that long-term stable supplier partnerships, as commonly associated with world class Japanese manufacturers (e.g. Womack et al., 1990), may have limited innovative potential; supplier ‘dalliances’ rather than alliances are called for—evoking Wilkinson and Young's (1994) notion of dancing with several business partners rather than engaging in a stable marriage. This is supported by research by Primo and Amundson (2002), suggesting that existing suppliers may be less important under conditions of high technical difficulty, and also by Johnsen et al. (2006) who suggest that supplier relationships are mostly of relevance in mature industry contexts; in emerging new industries (fluid contexts) other forms of inter-organizational interaction (customers and horizontal relationships) seem to be more important. Arguably, the majority of existing research on supplier involvement remains dyadic in focus. Although there has been an upsurge of research into different types of inter-organizational network, few studies have considered the role of wider supply networks on innovation. The thought-provoking study by Staudenmayer et al. (2005) suggests that modular products and industries require interaction with a web of partners, chiming with the idea of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) and extensive research into industrial networks (e.g. Håkansson, 1987; Axelsson and Easton, 1992). The network perspective gives rise to several interesting avenues of future research, including how companies can involve not only their direct existing suppliers in NPD, but also their wider supply networks, in what circumstances entire supply networks need to be involved, and potential lack of ability to involve suppliers due to relationship inter-connections. Studies by scholars linked to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing group have long advocated the need to understand dyadic buyer–supplier relationships as parts of complex industrial networks (e.g. Håkansson, 1987; Anderson et al., 1994). However, the network perspective has yet to win over the mainstream supplier involvement literature, even though the (European) Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management has published a few studies that seek to bridge the two (Wynstra and ten Pierick, 2000; Wynstra et al., 2000). There is no sign that supplier involvement in NPD is becoming exhausted as an area of research, especially if it embraces these challenges.