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Bringing new products to the marketplace faster has become a strategic imperative in many markets, especially high technology industries. Much attention has focused on techniques purported to bring products to the market more quickly, but little empirical research has been conducted to validate these techniques. This study tests the relationship between the popular time to market acceleration techniques and product development time in a sample of electronics companies. Our findings suggest that only four of the 12 techniques we studied are significantly related with development time performance as proposed. We found that fast developers had teams that were cross functional, dedicated, included fast time to market as a development goal, and overlapped development activities more so than slow developers. Our regression results were very significant, and accounted for 32% of the variance in development time performance. We concluded, however, given many of techniques were not supported that successful fast cycle development can not be accomplished by using a sporadic combination of factors. Furthermore, we feel additional research is needed to explore the interaction and mediating effects of these techniques upon each other, as well as identify other intermediate processes and external conditions that may also affect product development effectiveness.
Zirger et al. (1996) studied this question.