Leading the way to faster new product development

Executive Overview Industrial competitiveness can be evaluated in many ways, but for high-tech firms no measure is more important than that of getting new products into their relevant markets ahead of the competition. Especially for companies with technology-driven products, where technological obsolescence compounds the problems of head-to-head competition, speed-to-market is an essential factor for survival. As the last few years have seen more international competition for many U.S. companies, there have been numerous alarms calling for increased attention to this aspect of corporate competitive behavior. Partly in response to these clarion calls numerous studies in recent years have pointed out the economic and strategic benefits associated with the accelerated product introductions. Unfortunately, relatively few studies have examined the situation in detail, so that previous recommendations have often been limited to highlighting such mainstream concepts as concurrent engineering and cross-functional teams. However, the development of an organizational capability for accelerated new product development presents, in fact, formidable management challenges, so there is a pressing need for managers to understand implementation issues in some detail. In the spirit of these concerns, this article reports on a field study that asked managers of technology-based products what organizational and managerial approaches they actually used to speed up the product development process. Our explorations aimed at a richer understanding of the implementation realities, examining which approaches were preferred, why, and how they actually worked to accomplish the objective of speeding up the product development process.