متعادل سازی عملکرد کسب و کار و عملکرد دانش توسعه محصول جدید : درس هایی از صنعت ITS
کد مقاله | سال انتشار | تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی |
---|---|---|
2697 | 2006 | 18 صفحه PDF |
Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)
Journal : Long Range Planning, Volume 39, Issue 5, October 2006, Pages 525–542
چکیده انگلیسی
New product performance (NPD) has a critical impact on a company's profitability and thus on its long-term survival. This study identifies two important dimensions of new product performance: business performance and knowledge performance. The business performance of a new product in the market can be regarded as the outcome of exploitative NPD activity, while knowledge performance, the degree of new knowledge creation, can be seen as the outcome of NPD exploratory activity. While recent studies have suggested the importance of organizational ambidexterity in terms of exploration and exploitation, few have investigated its determinants at the product-level. This study addresses this issue, focusing on controllable factors in NPD, through an empirical examination of sixty NPD projects in the information and telecommunications service industry. We find that while product quality contributes to business performance, organizational support and NPD marketing and technical proficiency contribute to performance in both dimensions. The trade-off relationship between the two is illustrated by the level of NPD technical challenge, which has a negative effect on business performance but a positive effect on knowledge performance. Overall, our study shows that exploration can be compatible with exploitation in NPD. Based on the results, we derive managerial implications over various stages of an NPD project.
مقدمه انگلیسی
The development of new products has become a focus of industrial competition. New product development (NPD) is one of the most essential processes for organizations' success, and has a direct impact on their survival, particularly in fast-paced, competitive markets.1 Most companies recognize that a continuing stream of successful new products is essential to ensure long-term organizational health. However, they also recognize that product development is accompanied by high costs and risks. NPD success is not common: but while Cooper argues that only one out of seven new product ideas is successful, he also notes that the return on investment (ROI) from a successful new product can be 12 times that of an ordinary product.2 This perspective typically evaluates new product performance in terms of its market performance. In this article, we refer to the performance of a new product in the market as its business performance. Recent research attention has been paid to knowledge creating aspect of NPD, and NPD has been regarded as one of the most critical endeavours for creating organizational knowledge.3 Because competitive advantage rests increasingly on difficult to replicate knowledge assets, especially in knowledge-intensive industries, we also consider the degree of new knowledge creation as another important NPD performance dimension, which we term its knowledge performance. Because organizational knowledge and performance are closely linked, it is necessary for managers to consider the two performance dimensions for long-term profitability and growth of the firm. However, as the case in Exhibit 1 illustrates, a high level of knowledge performance does not always coincide with a high level of business performance. In fact, the argument between the two performance dimensions can be seen in terms of the classic exploration/exploitation divide. Business performance, which is related to the immediate gain from the utilization of a firm's knowledge base, can be regarded as the outcome of exploitative NPD activities, while knowledge performance can be seen as the outcome of exploratory activities, since it measures the degree of new knowledge creation. Exploration and exploitation employ fundamentally different logics, and it has been widely suggested that there are trade-offs between them.4 Considering these trade-offs, we ask whether it is possible, in an individual NPD project, for a firm to accomplish high levels of outcomes in terms of both business and knowledge performance. More specifically, we have the following questions in this study: What are the drivers of each performance dimension of NPD? Which drivers contribute to both dimensions and which represents the ‘trade-off’ between building knowledge and building business performance? What implications can be derived for better management of NPD? Recent empirical findings suggest that firms which are ambidextrous in terms of exploration and exploitation achieve superior performance.5 However the few studies which have investigated the antecedents of organizational ambidexterity find it to be facilitated by environmental characteristics such as dynamism and competitiveness, and organizational contexts characterized by a combination of stretch, discipline, support and trust.6 While these studies are focused on the business unit level analysis, we examine product level factors which are mainly under the firm's control. This study addresses the above questions in the Korean Information and Telecommunications Service (ITS) industry,7 which is an appropriate context for the following reasons. First, it is primarily a knowledge-intensive industry, where rapid technological changes, coupled with intense competition, compress product lifecycles. Customer knowledge is also an important building block of competitive advantage because the industry is characterized by its considerable potential for collecting information about individual customers and using that information to understand their preferences. Second, as Katila and Ahuja argue, creating new products in the industry is a complex problem and the ability to bring new products to the market is a key determinant of success. Through an empirical investigation of sixty NPD projects from the ITS industry in Korea (one of the most advanced countries in the sector) we find that organizational support and quality execution of development process contribute to both performance dimensions, while the technical challenge involved in an NPD project influences the two dimensions in opposite ways. Based on the analysis, we derive managerial implications over various stages of an NPD project. The rest of the article is composed as follows. The following section reviews the related literature to provide the theoretical background of this study. We then develop the conceptual framework of this study and derive hypotheses. The next two sections present research method and analysis results. Based on the results, we conclude with implications for research and practice.
نتیجه گیری انگلیسی
Finally, managers should also keep in mind the importance of knowledge sharing, and arrange for knowledge created in NPD projects to be transferred and applied across the organization in order for it to contribute to the fullest extent to business performance. As one executive emphasized: ‘the lessons from an NPD project should be crystallized, shared across the organization, and used as inputs to building NPD strategy.’ Our interviews found that knowledge sharing was unsatisfactory; with only 44% of the executives judging that their organizations were effective in sharing new knowledge. In fact, employees normally seemed to regard their unique knowledge as a source of power.28 It was also clear that sharing knowledge involves inherent costs in time and energy, which are finite resources. Managers should encourage employees to share knowledge using various recognised drivers - empirical evidence suggests the importance of an organization's commitment to knowledge sharing, of an organizational climate that promotes procedural justice or fairness, and of extrinsic or intrinsic incentives for knowledge sharing. Enhancing communities of practice and investing in knowledge management systems are also effective ways to encouraging knowledge sharing.29 New product development is one of the most important processes for the success of organizations. To manage the NPD process effectively, identification of business and knowledge performance is an essential first step. From our study in the ITS industry, we have derived several implications for the new product development process. The clear understanding and implementation of them will improve the NPD process and eventually heighten the performance of the organizations.