نقش بازار و گرایش کارآفرینی و کنترل داخلی در فعالیت های توسعه محصول جدید شرکت های چینی

In this study, we build a systemic conceptual model to describe the relationship among firm orientation, internal control systems and new product development, and to test empirically how market and entrepreneurship orientations affect the degree of improvement in new product development through personal control and/or output control in the Chinese transitional economy. Our research findings provide some valuable insights into new product development. Entrepreneurship orientation not only has a direct positive effect on the degree of improvement in new product development, but also indirectly has a positive effect on it through personal control. At the same time, market orientation, through output control, has a negative indirect influence.

In emerging Asian countries such as China, more and more firms have recognized that new product development (NPD) is a critical activity because new products are, for many firms, becoming the nexus of competition (Clark & Fujimoto, 1991) and are a potential source of competitive advantage (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1995). Because of an incomplete market environment and rapid changes in competition, many firms have focused their strategic orientation on NPD, in order to efficiently achieve effective NPD and reduce the risk of innovation. In marketing literature, some research has explored the relationship between market orientation and NPD (Atuahene-Gima, 1996 and Narver and Slater, 1990, p. 21), and has argued that market orientation encourages and supports adapting NPD to meet current needs rather than targeting NPD toward emerging new needs (Atuahene-Gima and Ko, 2001 and Bennett and Cooper, 1981). Hamel and Prahalad, 1991 and Hamel and Prahalad, 1995 also argue that firms which focus on their customers' current needs do not foresee the future or anticipate innovations which later turn out to be successful. In management literature, entrepreneurship orientation is viewed as a learning and selection mechanism that engenders exploratory and risk-taking behavior in NPD (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996 and Miller, 1983). Comparing the literature on both marketing and entrepreneurship orientations, Atuahene-Gima and Ko (2001) studied whether firms which are most market-oriented tend to develop products with a high degree of incorporated novelty, or whether they mainly focus on applying slight modifications to their product portfolio in order to adapt it slowly to changes detected in the market. However, the extant literature has neglected the important relationship between different firm orientations, such as entrepreneurship orientation and market orientation, and the degree of improvement in a firm's NPD, and as a result scholars have not been able to state with any confidence which orientation is more appropriate for improvement of NPD. Additionally, because NPD involves a high level of R&D investment, high process uncertainty and high-level risk, internal control systems have to be rationally adapted so that firms can efficiently avoid the risks while achieving the goals. Therefore, internal control systems are the most important mediating factors through which firm orientation affects the degree of improvement in NPD, and they can powerfully ensure that a firm's NPD activities are completed in ways that lead to the attainment of the organization's goals (Robbins, 2001). Unfortunately, we have little knowledge about how both entrepreneurship and market orientations affect the degree of improvement of NPD through internal control systems. To address these significant gaps, drawing on organizational control theory (Eisenhardt, 1985, Hoskisson and Hitt, 1988, Langfield-Smith, 1997 and Simmons, 1991), we contribute to the literature by constructing a conceptual model to describe the relationship among firm orientation, internal control systems and the degree of improvement in NPD, and to develop knowledge about the path-dependence of the influence of a firm's orientation through internal control systems. By examining the relationship among these factors in Chinese firms, we will explain the effects of firm orientation and internal control systems on the degree of improvement in NPD. Unlike most extant research in this area, which has taken place in Western market economies, we here shift the focus to the context of firms in the Chinese emerging economy. In 2002, the firms in China finished 59,788 new products, and this data became 68,633 in 2003 (National Statistics Bureau of China, 2004). Increasing rate of new products reaches 14.8%, and greatly higher than the increasing rate of GDP (8.6%). But, compared with their western counterparts, Chinese firms are more resource deficient (Matthews, 2002). How Chinese firms overcome their resource deficiency and then implement efficient improvement in NPD is worth exploring further. Moreover, with the increasing importance of China in the global economy, a focus on the NPD of Chinese firms can help Western companies better understand the NPD strategy of Chinese firms and hence better prepare them to compete and collaborate with Chinese firms. Following is the structure of this paper. First, by reviewing literature on firm orientations and NPD, we present the conceptual model in Fig. 1. Second, we discuss the relationship between firm orientation (entrepreneurship orientation or market orientation), internal control systems (personal control or output control) and the degree of improvement in NPD, and then we present hypotheses for each discussion. Third, we describe the study method and the study result, and finally we discuss our findings.

This study focuses on the relationship among firm orientations, internal control and the degree of improvement of NPD in China's turbulent economic environment, and develops knowledge about the path-dependence of a firm orientation's influence on the improvement of NPD through internal control systems. We examine the direct and indirect effects of firm orientation on NPD by internal control systems in Chinese firms. The results provide strong support for the systemic model presented in Fig. 1. Our results show that entrepreneurship orientation helps firms to take personal control and thereby promote great improvement in NPD activities. On the other hand, market orientation in Chinese firms emphasizes output control over personal control for NPD. Overall, the results show that although entrepreneurship orientation and market orientation have been argued to be the drivers of NPD, they have different associations with the degree of improvement in a firm's NPD. Besides these contributions, we also have following important findings. First, our finding that entrepreneurship orientation is significantly and positively related to improvement of NPD shows that improvements in NPD driven by entrepreneurship orientation in the Chinese transitional economy are at a high level. This result further supports the research of Foxall (1984) and Salavou and Lioukas (2003), who note that entrepreneurship orientation is a proactive strategic orientation that leads to aggressive initiation of product innovation and radical product innovation with high levels of financial uncertainty and risk, and also the research of Atuahene-Gima and Ko (2001), who note that entrepreneurship orientation positively affects product innovation activities and performance. However, almost all previous evidence comes from Western countries. We have not known until now whether similar effects hold for emerging countries such as China. With the rapid development of the Chinese economy and the opening of Chinese markets, more and more top managers of Chinese firms feel great competitive pressures and understand the importance of NPD activities in gaining competitive advantage. Although an incomplete market system increases the risk of NPD, managers with an entrepreneurship orientation can find more opportunities to benefit from NPD activities under turbulent transitional economic conditions. Our study further reinforces that entrepreneurship orientation is an important driving force for NPD activities in a traditional economic environment. The second group of findings, concerning the relationship between firm orientation and internal control systems, supports our hypotheses. Previous studies mainly focus on the relationship between firm orientation and product innovation or performance of NPD (Atuahene-Gima and Ko, 2001 and Slater and Narver, 1995), but the role of internal control systems in NPD activities has not been emphasized. Our results clearly show that entrepreneurship-oriented firms will select personal control to manage NPD activities, a finding which is consistent with the research of Barringer and Bluedorn (1999) and which implies that personal control is helpful in rewarding creativity and the pursuit of opportunity through NPD. Meanwhile, this study also suggests that market-oriented firms will select output control as their main internal control system and reduce the use of personal control. This result constitutes a new contribution to the literature. The third group of findings is about the relationship between internal control systems and the degree of improvement in NPD activities. The results show that output control is negatively related to improvement in NPD, whereas personal control is positively related to improvement. Hitt et al. (1996) find a positive relationship between strategic controls and internal innovation, and also a positive relationship between financial controls and external innovation. Unfortunately, from the research of Hitt et al. (1996) it is not possible to know the effect of different internal control systems on the improvement of NPD activities. Our research, however, provides a good explanation of this issue. From our results, we can know that firms which use personal control will achieve clear improvement of NPD activities, and that firms which use output control will not achieve such improvement. These results imply that personal control can help managers implement radical NPD and achieve clear outcomes in NPD, whereas output control may encourage managers to focus mainly on incremental NPD which may cause only a small improvement. We also find that the negative relationship between market orientation and improvement in NPD is not significant in the Chinese transitional economic environment. This result shows that market-oriented firms may be able to have different responses concerning NPD in a transitional economy. Slater and Narver (1995) noted that market orientation engenders product innovation behavior which focuses on understanding the articulated needs of customers. It therefore leads to exploitation of innovation opportunities that are associated with the current domain of the firm and that take advantage of its currently available learning and experience (Bennett and Cooper, 1981, Christensen and Bower, 1996 and March, 1991). However, during the Chinese economic transitional period, needs of customers change fast, and some of these needs may cause important changes in firms' NPD. Therefore we argue that, in a turbulent market environment, some market-oriented firms may also experience high-level improvement in NPD so that the negative effect of market orientation on the great improvement in NPD activities is insignificant. This result is consistent with views of Salavou and Lioukas (2003), who support neither of the previous claims that market orientation has neither a positive impact on radical product innovations (Davis, 1993 and Sandvik et al., 2000) nor a negative impact on radical product innovations (Atuahene-Gima, 1996, Bennett and Cooper, 1981 and Christensen and Bower, 1996). Although we hypothesized that there would be a negative relationship between entrepreneurship orientation and output control, our results instead indicate an insignificant relationship between these two factors. A plausible explanation lies in the nature of the sample — the specific Chinese transitional setting of this study. As an emerging economy, China may have characteristics similar to other emerging economies, where market perfection and law systems are still evolving (Khanna & Palepu, 1997). Especially under the current economic transitional environment, the Chinese capital market is not fully developed, and most Chinese firms face big pressures from the absence of capital when they want to develop rapidly along with the fast growth of the Chinese economy. Thus, top managers of firms have to take critical control measures in finance and output evaluation of NPD to conserve financial resources and pool financial risks of various divisions. Therefore the insignificant relationship between these two factors appears to be unique to the Chinese setting. Given this explanation of the reasons these two hypotheses are not supported, a valuable contribution of this study is that the emerging economic environment is an important factor in making the relationship among firm orientation, internal control systems and NPD activities in emerging Asian countries such as China different from that in Western countries. 5.1. Implications All the above findings have useful managerial implications. First, our study suggests that an entrepreneurship orientation is beneficial for improvement of NPD activities in a transitional economy, and thus that top managers of firms should incline toward choosing entrepreneurship as their main strategic orientation. From the research results concerning the relationship between the internal control systems and the degree of improvement in NPD, firms should understand that personal control should be emphasized more than output control in order to efficiently improve NPD. Especially in a transitional economy, firms should develop exploratory NPD by the use of personal control, in order to enhance their competitive advantage. However, although entrepreneurship orientation is favorable for NPD activities through personal control, it may also be more costly. In this case, some degree of output control may be useful to provide an efficient control of the cost of NPD. 5.2. Limitation and future research This study has limitations which should be addressed in future research. One caution is that the characteristics of market orientation and the types of internal control systems considered in this study have been limited to two (personal control and output control) and should be extended in future research to cover more characteristics in order to construct a general theory of NPD. Another limitation is that the results of the current study are context-specific and should be viewed cautiously when extended to other contexts. Although we have been very tentative regarding the generalizability of this study to other settings, there are theoretical reasons to believe that firms in other emerging economies may experience similar dynamics. Therefore, another useful extension would be to conduct this study in other emerging environments (Khanna and Rivkin, 2001 and Whitley, 1999). Moreover, the cross-sectional data used in the study do not allow for causal interpretation among the factors, although we requested that sample firms supply data during the previous five-year period. Ideally, the study would have benefited from a time lag between the measurement of the independent and dependent variables in order for causal relationships to be determined. We hope this study will serve as a foundation for future research in this area.