Partner Similarity and Crossover Product Development: Evidence From the PC Game Market

ABSTRACT This study addresses a critical gap in understanding the development of crossover products, particularly in the context of collaborative product development within the PC game market's supply chain. Traditionally, firms have focused on incorporating common product characteristics from a single market segment (e.g., genre) to minimize potential penalties associated with ambiguous product identities. However, recent trends show that “crossover” products, those that integrate distinctive features from multiple segments, have emerged due to their superior performance. Developing such innovative products requires profound expertise across multiple market segments, especially when supply chain partners collaborate. While prior research has explored the market performance of crossover products, it has offered limited understanding of the conditions required for their development. To address this gap, we propose a theoretical framework grounded in the input–output perspective of operations management, which examines how portfolio similarity between partners influences the ease of expertise reconfiguration and the breadth of segment‐spanning expertise needed for crossover product development. Our findings reveal an inverted U‐shaped relationship between portfolio similarity and the degree of crossover, suggesting that moderate similarity fosters the most effective reconfiguration of expertise. Further, we find that collaboration experience with the partner moderates the inverted U‐shaped relationship.