New Product Developmen

Wei Sun

MBA350

Dr. Yoo

Reading analysis 4

• Purpose of the article

Revealed the interactive relation between sales and marketing and between sales and R&D in each of NPD stage.

• Major Findings:

Author showed his new perspective about the relationship between exploring new product and the sales and marketing processes. For the prior academic research, sales and marketing always were thought to be homogeneous. Whenever people need do research in sales and marketing part for a new product development, they never focused on the interaction amongst sales, marketing and product develop. Author emphasized this shortcoming lead to high rate of failure happen when launching a new product into market. In this article, author told me what are the core element should be consider when estimating the failure rate of the new product. He mentioned that there are two aspects need to take care. How people are able to decide and control the extent of integration between two departments. Moreover, underpinning author’s perspective, the degree of the cross-function effect is better to be different in each stage of exploring one new product.

In the prior studies, scholars proposed several definitions to cross function effect and analyzed it by two aspects. The behavior approach and attitudinal approach. Behavior approach research focused on study of interaction among each department. Attitudinal approach research focused on mentally corporation. Author thought attitudinal approach was intangible and abstract. He choose make his study concentrating on behavior aspect.

Cooperation of sales, marketing and R&D in NPD

A new developed product has been contributed to satisfy both the customer’s need and company’s financial return. To that end, company has been more concerned about the cross function effect within sales, marketing and R&D department. The misunderstanding that sales research equals to marketing research blocked this effect run fluently. In fact, the sales and researcher analysis are different in terms of the orientation and competence. Sales largely focused on customer’s need. However, marketing has a closer connection with the research on market trend and customer segment at a view of large picture. Except the different orientation. Sales has a high level priority when both were took into the concern of decision making. Sales research contained more information directly coming from individual customer.

Hypotheses development

The resource dependence theory potently supported the cross-functional cooperation for making a NPD. First each department the sales, marketing and R&D is highly specialized division so that each one perform high profession in their part. However, all researches and decisions made by them have to alien to each other in abide to achieve a satisfied new product. Therefore, they must treat their work to be a collective task. And each department also need which is the department that is more necessary to contact with regarding different stage during the process of NPD. The extent of cooperation for each department varied with the process moved forward. In the article, the points need to concern about in various stages classified as three parts including concept development stage, product development and implement stage. And for each stage, two hypotheses made with regarding the impact deriving from sales or marketing department might affect the process of R&D.