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 pro cess. While this view has helped lead management to the wide-spread adoptio n of cross-functional new product development teams, in this study we quest ion whether simply increasing the level of functional integration is truly a guarantee for enhancing the performance of new products, To assess this w e examined patterns of cooperation between marketing, R&D, and operations a t both early and late stages of the new product development process for 34 recently developed products whose level of innovativeness ranged from high to low. A unique feature of this study is that data were collected from fou r sources for each project. This included personal interviews with a projec t leader and written surveys from marketing, operations, and R&D personnel on each project. Findings from this study reveal that: (1) functional cooperation typically increases as the process moves from early to late stages; (2) cooperation b etween marketing and R&D is highest during early stages of the process, but for marketing and operations, and for R&D and operations, cooperation typi cally increases as the process moves from early to late stages; (3) higher project performance - irrespective of the level of project innovation - is demonstrated when cooperation between marketing and R&D, and cooperation be tween operations and R&D is high during early stages; (4) late stage cooper ation between marketing and operations, and R&D and operations is a key det erminant in project performance for innovative products but not for noninno vative products, and; (5) that early stage cooperation between marketing an d operations is associated with superior performance for low innovation pro jects but is also associated with poor performance for innovative projects. Findings from this study demonstrate that the importance of cooperation bet ween specific functional dyads (i.e,, marketing - R&D; R&D - operations; op erations - marketing) indeed varies by time (i.e., early vs. late stages), and by the level of innovativeness (i.e., new-to-the-world vs. modification s) associated with the new product being developed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Scien ce Inc. All rights reserved.