اثر استراتژی مدیریت ریسک بر عملکرد NPD

New product development (NPD) is a major driver of firm growth and sustainable competitive advantage, yet risks are intrinsic in NPD in all industries. Thus understanding, identifying, managing, and reducing risk is of strategic importance for firms. In this research, we synthesize and build on previous research, and propose a three-dimensional risk management framework for NPD. We empirically test whether risk management strategy affects the performance of NPD using survey data from Chinese firms. The results show that risk management strategies targeted at specific risk factors, i.e., technological, organizational, and marketing, contribute both individually and interactively in affecting the performance of NPD. Appropriate risk management strategies can significantly improve the odds of NPD success.

Successful development and commercialization of new products (i.e., NPD) over time is essential to sustained competitive advantage of firms (e.g., Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1995; Hartley, 2006). However, risks are intrinsic in NPD in all industries (e.g., Kwak and LaPlace, 2005). Thus firms need to take initiatives to reduce risks that are related with NPD. The risk–uncertainty–reduction hypothesis suggests that reducing risk and uncertainty is a primary motivation guiding firms’ behavior (Bourgeois, 1984) and that increasing certainty by accumulating knowledge on how and on what to act “renders existence meaningful and confers confidence in how to behave and what to expect from the physical and social environment” (Hogg and Terry, 2000). This implies that effective risk management strategy would lead to increased firm NPD performance. In the context of NPD, risk refers to the possibility that a newly developed product might fail due to various uncertain factors, i.e., market failure, technology constraints, and organizational hindering factors that lead to insufficient sales for the product to survive and be profitable (Crawford and Di Benedetto, 2006). Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and firms must take risks to launch new products speedily and successfully. Firms thus require a strategy not simply of risk avoidance but risk management to successfully introduce new products to markets. Without proper risk assessment and risk management, projects can easily run out of control, consume significant additional resources, greatly inflate project costs and may lead to failure. Therefore, in NPD, the ability to develop, diagnose, and manage risks is increasingly considered to be of vital importance (Keizer et al., 2002). Prior studies (e.g., Doering and Parayre, 2000) suggest adopting a comprehensive risk management framework that integrates the three most important risk factors that affect NPD performance: technology, marketing, and organization. However, this approach pays little attention to the process nature of risk and there is little empirical evidence on how risk management can improve NPD performance. We seek to address this research gap by explaining and empirically testing how risk management strategy affects NPD. We synthesize the literature on risk management in NPD (e.g., Doering and Parayre, 2000; Keizer et al., 2002), and propose a three-dimensional risk management framework for NPD. A key challenge faced by an NPD project is how to acquire knowledge and manage the sources of uncertainty in order to reduce the risk of failure of the project or resulting product (Cooper, 2003; Crawford and Di Benedetto, 2006). For example, studies have found that timely and reliable knowledge about customer preferences is among the most important areas of information necessary for product development (Holt, 1988). Therefore, we explore the issues under investigation from a knowledge-based theory of the firm (e.g., Kogut and Zander, 1996), i.e., how firms acquire, create, accumulate, and exploit risk management-related knowledge to reduce technological, marketing, and organizational risks in NPD. The more difficult the project in terms of its scope, technology, and complexity, the more susceptible an NPD project is to perturbations and mismatches in organization, marketing strategy, and external environment, and the greater its need is for knowledge acquisition, creation, and exploitation for the project to succeed (Cooper, 2003). China is an ideal context for our empirical test. China has shifted its attention from a low-cost manufacturing advantage owing to low labor cost to developing technological expertise (Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006). Little research, however, has been conducted in understanding how firms in emerging markets conduct NPD projects (e.g., Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006). The complexity, turbulence, and dynamism of China's economic environment require that firms effectively mitigate risk to enhance NPD. More importantly, with the increasing share of China in the global economy, a focus on the NPD of China cannot only enhance our understanding of the NPD strategy of Chinese firms, but also can help firms world-wide learn how to exploit the world's largest untapped market and highest growth potential. It has become clear that businesses wanting to succeed globally will need to win in China first (Gadiesh et al., 2007). Thus, there is an urgent practical need to shed further light on NPD practices in this major emerging market (Lin and Germain, 2003).

Researchers have proposed that firms can reduce risk by increasing their stock of knowledge within their existing institutional framework and/or by altering their existing institutional framework (North, 2005). However, since it is often difficult for firms to change their institutional framework, increasing their stock of knowledge seems a more practical choice. In the context of NPD risk management, by increasing their stock of knowledge in NPD risk factors, firms can not only improve their response to uncertainty (e.g., Duncan, 1972), but also increase their “ability to predict what the nature of the impact of a future state of the environment or environmental change will be to the organization” (Milliken, 1987). If firms can effectively manage the risks associated with NPD by increasing their stock of knowledge, then risk and uncertainty will be a source not merely of threats, but also of opportunities. NPD is a problem-solving and knowledge-accumulation process. Progress is made and value is added by creating useful information that reduces uncertainty and/or ambiguity. Our hypothesis that a technology risk management strategy that targets technological risk factors is positively related to NPD performance is supported, though marginally. The marginal significance may imply that technological risk is more difficult to mitigate than other types of risk during the project development process because of quick competency-destroying technology obsolescence in a turbulent, complex and dynamic economic environment. Nevertheless, this result enriches our understanding that despite firms being in a volatile market, technological risks can be managed. Practitioners often regard an NPD project as having a high level of technological risk when they: (1) do not fully understand the technology, (2) do not know the exact means to accomplish the project, or (3) are unsure about the outcomes of the project. Such lack of knowledge increases firms’ exposure to risks (e.g., Daft and Lengel, 1986). Our empirical results suggest that, in managing technological risks facing NPD, firms are not without help: they can focus on technology-related risk factors to mitigate technological risk. Our findings confirm that a risk management strategy targeting organizational risk factors is positively related to NPD performance. Firms can respond to organizational risks based on their accumulated knowledge of organizational risk factors (Demaid and Quintas, 2006). Firms can routinely estimate their knowledge stock in risk management and their ability to monitor, analyze, and respond to organizational risk factors that would otherwise hinder their NPD success. Meanwhile, we hypothesized and confirmed that a risk management strategy that targets marketing risk factors is positively related to NPD performance. The knowledge on marketing risk factors and on how to manage these risks has been quickly accumulated in last two decades and firms have applied these techniques in their NPD risk management practice. Our empirical results provide evidence that firms can act on the accumulated knowledge to mitigate marketing risk in the NPD process. These findings add to our understanding of how to approach NPD risk management from a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Product development is a multidimensional and interrelated process. This implies risk management in NPD projects is also multidimensional. Unrecognized, unmanaged, or unmitigated risks are among the primary causes of project failure (Royer, 2000). Firms need to understand the risks inherent in particular project types so that they may select, plan, and execute project and risk management activities appropriately. The significant three-way interaction effect of technological, organizational, and marketing risk management found in our study suggests that the three risk management strategies are complementary and reinforce each other in contributing to NPD success. Thus risk management should take a comprehensive and integrated approach rather than focusing on any single factor. Recognizing risk does not mean an end to planning; indeed it makes planning more important, as it becomes part of the process of managing a business (Loasby, 1999). It is difficult if not impossible for top managers to specify ex ante each issue that needs to be resolved in the NPD process. Product development teams should therefore be given authority and flexibility to improvise solutions to handle contingencies as they arise.