Patterns of cooperation during new product development among marketing, operations and R&D: Implications for project performance

Successful new product development is fundamentally a multidisciplinary process. While this view has helped lead management to the wide-spread adoption of cross-functional new product development teams, in this study we question whether simply increasing the level of functional integration is truly a guarantee for enhancing the performance of new products. To assess this we examined patterns of cooperation between marketing, R (2) cooperation between marketing and R (3) higher project performance — irrespective of the level of project innovation — is demonstrated when cooperation between marketing and R (4) late stage cooperation between marketing and operations, and R (5) that early stage cooperation between marketing and operations is associated with superior performance for low innovation projects but is also associated with poor performance for innovative projects. Findings from this study demonstrate that the importance of cooperation between specific functional dyads (i.e., marketing — R R operations - marketing) indeed varies by time (i.e., early vs. late stages), and by the level of innovativeness (i.e., new-to-the-world vs. modifications) associated with the new product being developed.