How new product strategies impact on performance

What is involved in a successful new product program? Is it high spending on risky R&D? Is it close contact with customers? Is it the overall competitive strength of the firm? Well, it might be any of these things, and more, according to Robert G. Cooper, depending on your definition of success. In an exhaustive examination of the new product strategies and performances of 122 industrial products firms, Cooper found that the strategy that a firm elects for its new product program is closely linked to the performance results that firm achieves. But what's performance? Cooper's analysis uncovered three different and independent ways of viewing new product performance. He brings some clarity to the meaning of a “high-performance” product innovation program, but there's a catch—the strategies leading to high performance in one direction are quite different from the strategies leading to positive results by other measures. In his summing up, Professor Cooper proposes sets of generalized strategies—guides to action—that product innovation managers should consider.