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Rapid prototyping can potentially accelerate the entire process of new product development (NPD), enabling a high level of customer involvement and hence new product success (NPS). This study aims to examine the relationship between prototyping and NPS, and the moderating effect of customer involvement, as well as the influence of speed of information dissemination on customer involvement.

Data were collected using the survey method through structured questionnaires. The key participants were management and team leaders from technology-based companies.

The results indicate that prototyping positively correlates with NPS, particularly when customer involvement is high. The speed of information dissemination, both from customers and on competitive products, has a positive impact on customer involvement.

The study was limited by the undefined development stage of the prototype when offered for customer feedback. Future studies could focus on how customer involvement at each stage of prototype development affects NPS through a moderating effect.

The study confirms that investing in prototyping equipment for NPD increases the probability of NPS. Information capturing customers’ views and on competitive products in the market should be shared among the NPD teams. This could encourage better sharing of opinions and perceptions with customers about whether new products meet their wishes and expectations.

This study demonstrates that customer involvement moderates the relationship between prototyping and NPS. The degree of customer involvement depended on the speed of response of the customers themselves and on how well competitive product information was disseminated within the NPD team.

New product development team learning is important in today’s turbulent and uncertain markets and technologies. However, the literature treats team learning as a single construct, ignoring its multi‐dimensionality. In this study, we develop a multi‐dimensional team learning framework based on socio‐cognitive constructs. By studying 124 new product development projects, we show empirically that learning in new product development is best conceived as a multi‐dimensional structure with nine correlated but distinct constructs including: information acquisition, information implementation, information dissemination, unlearning, thinking, improvisation, memory, intelligence and sensemaking. Further, we demonstrate that a model based on the multi‐dimensionality of team learning provides a more robust explanation of new product success than does a unidimensional team learning model.

Speed‐to‐market is cited as being vital in today’s competitive, uncertain and turbulent environments. To help companies in their quest for speed in new product development, many tools and techniques have been developed. One of the these techniques – team improvisation – is receiving a great deal of attention in both practice as well as theory. However, we know surprisingly little about improvisation in a new product development context. In this paper, we extend previous team improvisation models and test them in a new product development context. By studying 354 new product projects, we found that team improvisation has a positive impact on speed‐to‐market under turbulent markets and technology conditions, and there are some mechanisms that can facilitate a team’s ability to improvise, such as team stability and teamwork. We also found that having a clear project goal will detract from a team’s ability to improvise.

The authors report on their findings from an ongoing seven‐year research project on the intersection of entrepreneurship, marketing and technology. The focus of their research is to identify factors that lead to better, faster and less expensive new product and service development. The present study investigates new product development practices in high‐technology small‐to‐medium enterprises (SMEs), including electronics and computer, biotechnology, military software, space, and electronic machinery companies. Gathering data from 60 new product development projects, the authors found that successful project teams perform certain practices better than unsuccessful ones. These include project visioning, process proficiency, management support, documentation systems, established project deadlines, team processes, and communication. Further, the authors identified critical success factors in the new product development projects as process proficiency, effective filing system, an established project deadline, information coding, and reduced formal communication within teams.

The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding on team listening by incorporating an action component. The authors empirically test the effect of this expanded concept, namely team action listening on team success, and investigate how team commitment moderates the relationship between team trust and team action listening.

The authors explored listening in teams in the field and in the lab, both qualitatively and quantitatively, through studying 474 team members representing 100 teams. The authors tested the hypotheses by structural equation modeling augmented with in-depth team interviews.

The findings showed that: teams demonstrate that they listen by taking action, teams that exhibit action listening are more successful, there is a direct relationship between team trust and team action listening and team commitment negatively moderates this relation in larger teams.

Managers should encourage taking action in team discussions. Yet, they should be wary of the detrimental effects of team commitment to team action listening particularly in teams with high trust. Commitment increases the risk of groupthink and decreases the participation to team discussions and listening. In particular, managers may benefit from keeping the team smaller, as in large teams, commitment suppresses the relationship between trust and team action listening.

This study extends research on team listening by adding the action aspect that distinguishes successful teams. It is one of the first to investigate the interrelationships between team trust, commitment, team action listening and success in teams.

Large firms have traditionally commanded a competitive advantage in the marketplace over small firms by being able to use their financial strength to perform large‐scale market research studies, to design and implement wide reaching advertising campaigns, and to establish computer and information systems to communicate with their staff and suppliers. This empirical study of 192 large and small companies indicates that small firms are using new media technologies to level the competitive playing field. Cost‐effective new media technologies are making it easier for small firms to enjoy some of the benefits that previously were only available to large companies. Contributes to the scholarship because little relevant research currently exists on the marketing uses of new media technologies for small firms and their potential for altering the competitive advantages long enjoyed by larger firms.

Learning in new‐product development teams is cited as being vital in today's competitive, uncertain, and turbulent environments. However, studies on accelerated learning in product‐development teams are, surprisingly, lacking. This study proposes a model for accelerated team learning in new‐product development based on constructs borrowed from accelerated learning models (or “suggestopedy”) in the individual learning scholarship. It is argued that fast‐learning teams launch new products more quickly, and with increased probability of success. Moreover, specific mechanisms to help teams learn more quickly are within the control of teams. These include vision clarity, learning from customers and competitors, information coding, top management support, past product review, aggressive deadlines and daily meetings.

New product development (NPD) is a noteworthy field that has attracted the attention of scholars for its relevance for firm success. Based on bibliometric indicators and spatial distance network analysis, the authors outline the general structure overview of NPD research through the last 40 years of scientific production; identify and categorize key articles, authors, journals, institutions, and countries related to NPD research; identify and map the research subareas that have mostly contributed to the construction of NPD intellectual structure. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The work uses the Web of Science Core Collection and the visualization of similarities viewer software. The analysis searches for all the documents connected to NPD available in the database. The graphical visualization maps the bibliographic data in terms of bibliographic coupling and co-citation.

The general NPD citation pattern evidences a construction of knowledge and learning, as evidenced in different subjects, such as biology or physics. Relevant contributions and contributors are highlighted as journals, articles, researchers, countries and institutions in overall NPD research and in its constituent subfields. Five subareas related to the NPD field based on journals and authors network are identified: marketing; operations and production; strategy; industrial engineering and operations; and management.

This paper contributes to the NPD literature by offering a global perspective on the field by using bibliometric data graphical networks, providing insights about the influence of individual actors and its contributions to build bridges between the different subfields of research in NPD.