Strategic management of R&D and marketing integration for multi-dimensional success of new product developments: an empirical investigation in the Korean ICT industry

The purpose of this study is to show the impact of the R&D and marketing integration on new product development (NPD) success without any parametric assumptions on model specification. In the high-tech innovation management context, it has generally been accepted that tight integration between R&D and marketing successfully influences the development of an innovative product by stimulating a mutual understanding between people from different departments. However, a few researchers also pointed out that a too close relationship between R&D personnel and marketing personnel can cause important information to be overlooked, thus reducing NPD success. Our research results, which are based on empirical data and the application of the nonparametric regression method Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, show an even more diverse effect of integrating R&D and marketing if different performance criteria are considered. Results demonstrate that the effect of integration between R&D and marketing is nonconstant and nonlinear, a finding that could not be captured with parametric assumptions. Therefore, our research provides an explanation for the opposing observations reported in earlier work.