An investigation of the use of global, virtual, and colocated new product development teams

This paper presents the results of an investigation of differences between global, virtual and colocated new product development (NPD) teams. Specific ally, we examined whether and how these three types of teams differed in te rms of usage, challenges, and performance. A survey of PDMA members was undertaken to collect the data. Out of 103 fir ms participating in the survey, 54 had used or were using global teams for some of their NPD efforts. Overall, we found that the use of global teams in our respondent firms is r apidly increasing. Our respondents indicated that by the year 2001, approxi mately one out of every five NPD teams in their companies are likely to be global. However, our respondents also expect that their companies will be u sing multiple types of teams that is, global, virtual, and colocated, to de velop their new products. Our findings also suggest that global teams generally face greater behavior al and project management challenges than either colocated or virtual teams . Global team performance is also lower than the performance of virtual or colocated teams. Are these challenges associated with poorer performance? I n examining this question, our results suggest that greater project managem ent challenges are associated with lower performance, for all three types o f teams. Surprisingly, behavioral challenges were not associated with perfo rmance for any team type. Our results suggest that firms face different problems associated with mana ging each type of NPD team-global, virtual and colocated. To effectively ma nage each type of team may, in turn, require that companies and their manag ers employ different solutions to these different problems. Additionally, c ompanies may find that the preparation they provide to their managers and t eam members to work in these different team environments may also need to b e different. Further research is clearly needed to address these managerial implications. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. AU rights reserved.