Effect of Improvisation on Product Cycle Time and Product Success: A Study of New Product Development (NPD) Teams in the United States

For many years, the long established referral process for successfully developing and commercializing new products has been called a phased-review or Stage-Gate system. The purpose of this article is to test whether increases the odds of faster product launch and greater new product success throughout this process. Using a specially designed questionnaire, 392 NPD project managers were asked their opinion of their team's use of a phased-review process and on their most recently completed NPD project, as well as how fast they were in launching the new product and how successful the new product was in the market. There was agreement that a NPD process increases efficiency and improvisation, as well as the likely success of new products in the market. Introduction Times change, and with it processes and procedures must adapt to shifting conditions. The new product development process is not exempt from the need to respond to new organizational, environmental or situational circumstances. Until recently, the school of on NPD process indicated that a approach should be adhered to throughout the phased-review process or Stage-Gate system in order to reduce NPD cycle time and increase the probability of new product success (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1986, 1987a & b, 1991; Millson & Wilemon, 2002; Shepherd & Ahmed, 2000). This will be referred to as die school of thought. Since this school of two schools of have sought to enhance the NPD process. The first new school of is an enhancement to the NPD process. Cooper & Kleinschmidt (1995) mention that a process should be adhered to, however they add that stages can be skipped or combined. The activities within each stage need not be fully executed prior to proceeding through a gate, although the authors do assert that a NPD process should still contain the approach. This school of will be referred to as the flexible school of thought. The second school of is the most extreme case of flexibility, which is improvisation. In the school of thought, firms without a formal NPD process can execute tasks in no fashion; thereby leading NPD teams to improvise as the project progresses. Moorman & Miner (1998) have found that can have a positive effect on new product outcomes. While flexibility has been related to the school of the limitation of the school of thought is that it has not yet related to the NPD structure. The purpose of this study is to attempt to reconcile the structured and improvisation schools of in a new product development context. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: the first section illustrates the seeming gap in the literature that deals with within the stages of NPD. The second part of this paper is to empirically determine if within the phases of NPD is related to speed or success. Background During the 1960s and 1970s companies began to openly be concerned with the high failure rate in new product development or NPD (Cooper, 1994). This was attributed to many reasons including inadequate market analysis, lack of effective marketing, higher costs than anticipated, and technical production problems or defects (Cooper, 2001 ). One solution was to implement a formal NPD process necessary to produce more successes. This formal process (developed by NASA) brought order to an otherwise chaotic activity. Its process was broken into discrete phases and was heavily controlled. While this formal process may be necessary for government organizations, this proved too rigid a process for most firms. The process was designed to ensure that every facet of the project was completed. The process was very engineering driven and applied strictly to the development of the product thereby utilizing engineering teams and cross functional teams were not used. …