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The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap in understanding the effects of external involvement on new product market performance. Particularly, the authors investigate the mediating effects of speed-to-market of new products and moderating effects of information technology (IT) implementation.

This study is based on the high-performance manufacturing (HPM) project database collected from 366 manufacturing plants in ten countries and three representative industries. The hierarchical regression analysis is employed to explore the relationships in the model.

The empirical findings indicate that speed-to-market of new products positively and significantly mediates the relationship between customer involvement and new product market performance. The results also demonstrate that IT implementation moderates the relationship between external involvement and speed-to-market of new products. More importantly, the findings reveal that supplier involvement is less likely to lead to the enhancement of speed-to-market if the firm is not able to establish a higher level of IT implementation.

This analysis uncovers the way of how customer and supplier involvement are related to new product market performance, and highlights the importance of IT implementation in absorbing and exploiting external resources.

This paper moves us from a simplistic understanding of external involvement to a more nuanced and complex model which is closer to reality. The obtained findings highlight the importance for manufacturers to establish speed advantage of new products and implement IT as an enabler.

This study aims to investigate marketing capabilities that represent the marketing mix from an adaptive perspective: brand management, customer relationship management, price management and multi-channel management. Also, this study identifies how adaptive marketing capabilities (AMCs) enrich superior innovativeness and speed-to-market regarding innovation orientation and marketing orientation as the two critical functions.

A questionnaire-based research was performed to test the proposed hypotheses. The data were collected from predominately marketing or research and development managers/senior specialists in 247 firms.

Strategic orientations that cover market and innovation orientation facilitate a firm’s AMCs, positively affecting its innovativeness and speed-to-market. Also, AMCs mediate the relationship between strategic orientations, and innovativeness, and speed-to-market. Further, this study confirms the complementary association of AMC-related variables in enhancing firm innovativeness and speed-to-market.

This study is subject to the limitations inherent in survey design, particularly convenient sampling and single informants.

This study broadens understanding of dynamic capabilities theory by examining how marketing capabilities can be enhanced and examined from an adaptive perspective for firms. This study also presents a model for the potential relationships among strategic orientations, AMCs, innovativeness and speed-to-market.

This paper investigates the influence of team characteristics and organization context factors on new product quality and compares these influences on Taiwanese (Collectivists) and American (Individualist) teams. For the Taiwanese teams, new product quality was positively affected by the capability of information integration and quality orientation of the firm, but was negatively influenced by speed-to-market pressure and level of product innovativeness. Functional and tenure diversity had no effect on new product quality. The capability of information integration in a team tended to reduce the negative effect of speed-to-market pressure on new product quality. For American teams, new product quality was positively affected by functional diversity, capability of information integration in the team, and quality orientation of the firm, but negatively influenced by supplier involvement. Customer involvement did increase the positive effect of the capability of information integration on new product quality.

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.

Customer involvement has been recognized as a key factor for successful service development. One important aspect affecting the outcome of new service development (NSD) projects in whose development customers are involved is the choice of the appropriate participating customer. This study aims to examine the effect of two customer characteristics (relational closeness and lead‐userness) on four indicators of new service performance.

The paper uses data from 102 NSD projects. Covariance‐based path analysis is used to test the model.

The results reveal that involving close customers in the NSD process has a positive direct effect on service advantage and speed to market and a positive indirect effect on market performance. The involvement of lead users, on the other hand, has a positive effect on service newness and service advantage, and a negative effect on market performance.

The focus on Spanish companies puts constraints on the generalizability of the results to other national contexts. Future research should replicate this study in different countries. Also, future research could explore more deeply the performance impact of close customers and lead users by collecting data on the roles that customers can play in NSD.

The findings from this study suggest that firms need to make conscious choices about the types of customers to involve in service innovation as different types of customers affect new service performance differently.

This study makes an original contribution by investigating the effect of customer's relational closeness and customer's lead userness on four indicators of NSD performance.

The purpose of this article is to present a model that compares the switching costs that consumers face when they buy pioneering and follower products.

A study of 255 new products indicates that switching costs are actually higher when switching from an existing product to a pioneering product.

The study shows that people who buy a pioneering product may also face switching costs, if the pioneering product is launched in an existing category where consumers are already familiar with similar products.

The results help to reinforce the view that first movers have advantages and demonstrate that switching costs do not lead to a higher level of consumer retention.

This study provides interesting managerial implications on how to launch new products more effectively when they suffer from switching costs..

Researchers commonly view switching costs as a barrier to market entry that protects enterprises that launch pioneering products and gives them a competitive advantage over those that launch follower products. The underlying idea is that people only experience switching costs when they change to a different follower product, rather than when they purchase a pioneering product instead of the product that they usually purchase.

The paper seeks to develop strategic planning to enhance sustainable competitiveness in the US textile industry with a consideration of DR‐CAFTA as an opportunity to establish responsive supply chain networks in the Western hemisphere.

The analysis was based on literature reviews, trade data analyses, and site visits for personal interviews at textile and apparel companies in North Carolina and the Office of Textile and Apparel at the US Department of Commerce, Washington, DC.

DR‐CAFTA countries constitute the only remaining region that the US textile industry can use to achieve speed‐to‐market advantages from geographical proximity. Market analysis indicated both voids and opportunities in “fast retailing” supply chain networks. In developing time‐to‐market supply chain networks, it is suggested that the implementation of DR‐CAFTA should focus on: streamlining the rules of origin, expanding the short‐supply list, and coordinating custom procedures; financing options for DR‐CAFTA countries' procurement of fabrics and other raw materials from the USA.

Two models are proposed which can possibly be implemented by the US textile industry: a shortened supply chain for knitted sportswear and fashionable shirts that can capitalize on time‐to‐market; and triangular supply‐chain networks among US retailers and textile companies, Asian textile manufacturers, and DR‐CAFTA apparel manufacturers for fashion basics.

This study has an implication for the US textile industry and policy makers to develop future strategic planning in the post‐quota era. The suggestions will contribute to enhancing the competitiveness of the US textile industry in the intense global competition by achieving speed‐to‐market with DR‐CAFTA countries.

Firms build new product development alliances to cope with the demands of continuous and rapid new product development. Such alliances allow surplus access to complementary capabilities and knowledge. However, the successful use of specialization advantages requires coordination and effective communication between alliance partners. Communication is vital to alliance success, as it allows a timely flow of information and resources across partners and supports the coordination within the alliance. The aim of this study is to research how divergent communication schemes influence firms’ new product development performance in alliances.

A paper-and-pencil survey about firms’ collaborative new product development performance in the German medical device industry was conducted. Results are derived from a survey of n = 184 new product development alliances in the medical device industry. To test the hypotheses, structural equation modeling (SEM) using the Mplus 7.0 software was applied.

The empirical results indicate that divergent communication schemes enhance product innovativeness and speed to market in new product development alliances. The development of new insights and solutions through joint sensemaking builds the theoretical fundament for the supportive effects of divergent communication schemes. Divergent communication schemes go hand in hand with ambiguity, that is, the source of joint dialogues and discussion through which alliance partners refine and adapt their different perspectives and interpretations. However, the supportive effect of divergent communication schemes on speed to market declines with increasing collaboration intensity.

The assessment of divergent communication schemes and new product development performance of the dyadic relationships in this survey is only based on one respondent. Furthermore, the study’s focus on a specific industry sector, albeit one fitting particularly well to the research question, may further limit the generalizability of the empirical findings. Future research should thus strive to take both firms of the dyadic relationship into account and moreover attempt to investigate mediating effects such as joint sensemaking or creativity.

The results indicate that alliance managers should become aware that different ways of communication are not per se dysfunctional. To achieve beneficial effects, they should enhance dialogues and constructive discussions through which the alliance partners develop novel insights and solutions on the fundament of occurring misunderstandings that root in divergent communication schemes. Regular meetings and conferences as well as inter-organizational teams should be applied because they stimulate joint dialogues and discussions in alliances. These instruments also enable learning processes and the development of trust that are both crucial for sensemaking processes in alliances.

Prior research has stressed the importance of interorganizational communication for the success of alliances. However, little is known about the effect of divergent communication schemes in alliances. This study shows theoretically and empirically that divergent communication schemes can improve new product development performance in alliances. The supportive effect of divergent communication schemes is contrary to the argumentation that communication problems and misinterpretations hamper alliance success.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of the level of procedural justice climate in new product development (NPD) teams. The aim is to discover answers to the following questions: First, can the procedural justice climate level be used to predict NPD team outcomes such as product performance and product creativity? Second, what NPD team characteristics can be leveraged to improve the justice climate?

A theoretical model was developed and tested on the survey data collected from 93 product managers of Turkish companies. The product managers who participated in this study represented various industries, including those of telecommunications, food, material, software, machinery, chemicals, and service technologies.

Statistical analyses demonstrated that stability, collectivism, and moderate‐level functional diversity of teams were significantly related to the procedural justice climate. In addition, procedural justice climate had significant positive impacts on new product creativity and speed to market. Such impacts were found to be more significant with regard to high‐turbulence conditions.

This paper is the first attempt to explore the role of procedural justice in NPD teams.

The purpose of this paper is to build and provide a step-by-step methodology to develop a speed-to-market (STM) process model for a fashion garment that can quickly respond to the marketing situation and shorten the cycle time from receiving orders to deliver the finished product. The improved STM process model to contrast the “before” and “after” scenarios in order to induce potential benefits such as reducing production lead-time and keeping low inventory.

First, collected garment business management systems and garment manufacture operational process. Second, according to the point-line-plane-volume work improvement to list the garment industry up and down stream improvement projects and to reduce the supply chain lead-time. Third, establish the STM model and use information technology to redesign the garment industry supply chain process. Fourth, amend the STM model process. Fifth, compare the supply chain lead-time of finished STM process and normal process.

After the garment industry implements STM and supply chain re-engineering, the clothing design to sale process can be simplified and reduced time to market. The garment order to buyer lead-time is shortened from 104 to 42 days totally.

This research is a practical business re-engineering process and work improvement. The improvement STM model can half the cycle time from receiving orders to deliver the finished garment product.

This paper provides a process with a step-by-step methodology to develop a successful speed-to-market model for the fashion garment industry and it is able to serve as a reference model for other industrial supply chain management.