بازارگرایی و محصولات جدید برای جهان: بررسی اثرات تعدیل کننده نوآوری، قدرت رقابت و نیروهای محیطی

Recently, there has been a keen research interest in exploring the relationship between market orientation and new product development. The empirical results, however, are mixed, and this means that we do not fully understand these linkages. Furthermore, research concerning the antecedents of new-to-the-world products has focused on the study of a single product. However, it is of obvious interest for organizations to understand what drives a firm's overall performance in the exercise of developing very innovative products. In this empirical study, the authors take a component-wise approach to investigate the effects of market orientation in new-to-the-world product innovation, and examine how other variables interplay with market orientation to affect product development. Firstly, the findings show that both customer and competitor orientations, together with interfunctional coordination, are important drivers of a firm's new-to-the-world product innovation. Secondly, the results indicate that the components of market orientation are differentially moderated by a firm's innovativeness, competitive strength, and also by environmental forces.

The pursuit of a link between organizational culture and competitiveness has spurred research on the strategic orientation of firms, and in particular, the concept of market orientation has attracted a massive interest in the last decade. A number of researchers argue the possibility that market orientation contributes to organizational performance through the new products it helps bring to market (Deshpandé et al., 1993 and Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997). In fact, ensuring organizational prosperity can be considered the ultimate goal of new product development efforts (Li and Calantone, 1998 and Wheelwright and Clark, 1992). Therefore, of research interest for some time, has been whether market orientation affects product innovativeness, i.e., the degree of a product's newness. The links between market orientation and the degree of product innovation are far from being fully explained (Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997, Lukas and Ferrell, 2000 and Zhou et al., 2005). The relationship between the three components of Narver's and Slater's (1990) conceptualization of market orientation and the development of innovative products, in particular, meets very mixed findings and arguments in the literature (e.g., Atuahene-Gima, 1996, Christensen and Bower, 1996, Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997, Lukas and Ferrell, 2000 and Slater and Narver, 1994). Consequently, Zhou et al. (2005:43) have recently argued that “the central issue of whether market orientation facilitates or impedes breakthrough innovation remains unanswered”. The disparate findings and contentions have led researchers to investigate how other organizational variables could possibly influence the effects of market orientation on new product innovativeness. Thus, the goal of this article is to examine how market orientation interplays with other variables to influence the launch of new-to-the-world products, which are new to the company and new to the market. Products with a higher degree of innovation have a higher perceived sales and financial performance (Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997 and Zhou, 2006). Similarly, early entry has been associated with greater effectiveness of marketing mix strategies and greater market share (Szymanski, Troy, & Bharadwaj, 1995), and also with higher firm survival rates (Robinson & Min, 2002). Highly innovative products should thus contribute to a greater extent, to the overall performance of organizations. Specifically, this research differentiates from other studies relating market orientation with product development, and thus contributes to existing theory and practice, by addressing a number of key gaps. Firstly, the focus of our study is on the factors contributing to an organization's performance in terms of new-to-the-world product innovation. In this way, we provide new insights, as the majority of past research investigating highly innovative products is concentrated on the drivers of a single innovation (e.g., Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997 and Zhou et al., 2005). It is of obvious interest for both practice and theory not just to understand the factors underlying product innovativeness, but also to appreciate those contributing to a firm's overall performance on this matter. Secondly, we investigate how the three components of Narver's and Slater's (1990) conceptualization of market orientation influence the development and launch of new-to-the-world products, still an unresolved issue (Lukas and Ferrell, 2000 and Zhou et al., 2005). Thirdly, we consider in our research when the expected effects of market orientation should take place, and this is important given the mixed results in extant literature concerning the relationship between market orientation and the development of highly innovative products. These mixed results suggest that the effects of market orientation may be contingent upon other variables, and this is consistent with previous studies (e.g., Baker & Sinkula, 1999). Thus, we consider the moderating effects of a firm's innovativeness and competitive strength, on the relationship between market orientation and new-to-the-world product innovation. Several authors claim that the role of innovation has been neglected in market orientation studies (Jaworski and Kohli, 1996 and Hurley and Hult, 1998). Furthermore, the interplay between market orientation and innovation is not yet well-understood (Han et al., 1998 and Noble et al., 2002), and this will be particularly true in explaining product innovation. With regard to competitive strength, Burke (1984) found this to be a significant determinant of the strategic thrust of a strategic business unit. However, investigations on product development have failed to incorporate its potential effects. Furthermore, we investigate how environmental conditions moderate the effects of the market orientation components on the development of new-to-the-world products. Lukas and Ferrell (2000) conclude that new studies should explore how environmental forces interplay with market orientation to influence different types of product innovation. We expect that the moderating effects of firm innovativeness, competitive strength, and environmental forces will help explain some of the contradictory findings in the literature.

This study suffers from a number of shortcomings that must be considered and possibly addressed in future research. The sample is composed of a diverse number of industries. This approach promotes the generalization of results. However, it has been found that sometimes the results are industry-sensitive. Consequently, it would be interesting to investigate whether the findings in this study are replicated in specific industries. We also did not test the relationship between firm performance and overall new-to-the-world product innovation. This would have provided further evidence on the importance of our dependent variable. In addition, some of the variables in our study have an average variance extracted below 0.50, and this may have affected the capacity to detect significant relationships. The sample size also is not that large, particularly considering the number of variables in the study, and this adversely affects the power to detect significant relationships. Consequently, this may be an additional explanation for not finding significant effects for some of the predictors. Building a market orientation is considered a long-term endeavor that does not necessarily produce immediate pay-offs. This implies the suitability of a longitudinal study. However, the findings in our study are obtained from cross-sectional data. We also rested on Narver's and Slater's (1990) conceptualization of market orientation, but other conceptualizations have been developed (e.g., Deshpandé et al., 1993 and Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). Consequently, future research may investigate the effects of different operationalizations of market orientation on new product development. The literature reveals conflicting results involving the different components of market orientation. Kohli and Jaworski (1990:16) suggest that simply implementing market-oriented activities does not necessarily ensure the quality of those activities. It is thus urgent to consider whether the quality of the market-oriented activities is interfering in the relationship between market orientation, new product development, and organizational performance. This research would be well positioned to make a significant contribution to theory. It is also possible that other variables moderate, and even mediate, the relationship between market orientation and product innovation, and this deserves consideration. Technological orientation, defined as the “ability and will to acquire a substantial technological background and use it in the development of new products” (Gatignon & Xuereb, 1997: 78) has the potential to moderate the effects of the market orientation components on the development of highly innovative products. It seems plausible as well to envisage the moderating or mediating effect of the quality of market-oriented activities on the relationship between market orientation and product innovation. This study did not find a significant link between innovativeness, competitive strength and new-to-the-world product innovation. In line with the previous discussion, future research should address the interplay of these variables with technological orientation to affect product innovation. Furthermore, innovativeness has been considered either a consequence of market orientation (e.g., Hult et al., 2004), or an orientation that may co-exist alongside market orientation (e.g., Hult & Ketchen, 2001), and this seems to be an issue deserving future clarification. Research in this area can also further explore the role of coordination in new product development. The literature is plagued with contradictory findings concerning the effects of interfunctional coordination. We therefore believe that it is relevant to research whether it is firm-wise coordination or solely the integration of marketing and R&D that matters most for the development of new products. Related to this issue, is the analysis of the consequences, namely in terms of degree of innovation, entry timing, and the planning of activities, associated with an increase in the number of departments involved in the coordination of new product development. We speculate that an increase in the number of departments involved will produce mixed consequences. Furthermore, coordination has been associated with some drawbacks, namely conflicts of interest between different departments and compromising solutions, and these can possibly explain some of the conflicting results in the literature. Consequently, investigating the extent to which these drawbacks take place can have significant pay-offs.