THE IMPACT OF CHANGING MARKETS AND COMPETITION ON THE NPD SPEED/MARKET SUCCESS RELATIONSHIP

Our research examines the relationships among four factors thought to be important to new product developing organizations. Those factors include the speed with which product developers produce new products and bring them to market; the degree of integration among the various groups participating in the New Product Development (NPD) process; the proficiency with which the product developers perform their tasks; and the degree of success attained upon the completion of the NPD process. Market dynamism, or the degree of customer changeability, and market hostility, or the degree of market competitiveness, are thought to moderate the relationships among the four previously noted factors.The research questions driving our investigation include: (1) Does NPD project success vary with NPD process speed?; (2) Does NPD speed vary across innovation types (new-to-the-world products, line extensions, etc.)?; (3) Does the strength of the relationships among NPD speed, organizational integration, NPD proficiency (overall and Fuzzy Front End [FFE]), and success vary with the degree of environmental dynamism (changing customer needs)?; and (4) Does the strength of the relationships among NPD speed, organizational integration, NPD proficiency (overall and FFE), and success vary with the degree of market hostility (competition)? We probed the electrical equipment, medical device, and heavy construction equipment industries to provide the data to address our research questions.Our research suggests that the speed with which projects were completed in our sample did not vary between projects that were more or less successful. We also found that the speed with which projects were completed did not vary across various product categories (new-to-the-world, line extensions, etc.) of newly developed products for the industries studied. Primarily, we found that market dynamism moderates the relationship between NPD speed and NPD proficiency whereas environmental hostility mediates NPD speed and NPD proficiency, NPD speed and organizational integration, and NPD speed and new product market success.Our data indicate that speed is not associated with NPD proficiency, degree of organizational integration, and new product success in less dynamic markets whereas speed has an inverse relationship with successfully entering new markets, the proficiency with which development and launch activities are performed, and the proficiency with which new product marketing strategies were implemented in more dynamic markets. Finally, we found that speed is inversely related to successfully entering new markets, overall NPD proficiency and organizational integration, predevelopment stage proficiency and organizational integration, and development and launch proficiency and organizational integration in non-hostile (competitive) environments whereas we found no significant relationships between these factors and speed in hostile environments. We provide several implications for both scholars and NPD managers.Innovation, market, dynamism, speed, success, competition, mediator, proficiency

TECHNOLOGY ENABLING INNOVATION IN ONLINE GRADUATE MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

It has been approximately twenty-five years since the Internet became available for public use and slightly over ten years since the World Wide Web became readily accessible. In this paper, we examine innovations in graduate management educational delivery methods that have increased the quality of distance education by investigating the literature surrounding distance education with a focus on four major concepts and their association with modern education technologies. Our exploration involves a comparison of an innovative, parsimonious, online educational model with other methods of graduate management education especially for adult management students. Through this model, we focus on four major concepts that can have a significant impact on management education quality. The first two concepts include dialogue and structure that have been used to describe and assess the quality of distance education programs. The second two concepts comprise students' ability to access courses and the flexibility that students have relative to their participation in courses. We note that these four factors can impact the delivery, content, innovativeness, and quality of graduate management education programs. We review existing models of distance education and note how each model relates to each of these four factors. We then suggest how the design and delivery of online education programs can be improved with a greater understanding of these four concepts in addition to their relationship with recently developed web-based technologies. Finally, we discuss several issues surrounding the administration of web-based education programs and identify several questions that call for further investigation.Management education, innovation

INNOVATION IN HEAVY CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

This research investigates three major hypotheses important to new product market success in the heavy construction equipment industry which are as follows: the greater the degree of organisational integration during the development of new products, the greater will be the market success of new products; the greater the degree of organisational integration during the development of new products, the greater will be the proficiency with which new product development activities are performed; and the greater the proficiency with which new product development activities are performed, the greater will be the new product's success in the marketplace. Information was obtained concerning the most and least successful new products of U.S. firms in the heavy construction equipment industry. "Organisational integration" is defined as the degree of cooperation and communication between internal and external new product development (NPD) "support" groups and NPD teams. "NPD process proficiency" is defined as how well new product development stages and the NPD process as a whole are performed. "New product market success" is represented by four measures that encompass profit expectations, sales expectations, success entering new markets and entering existing markets with new products successfully. The survey approach was utilised to obtain data. Questionnaires were mailed to recipients such as New Product Development Managers who had already been designated by executives of the sample firms. A number of important findings were uncovered during this research. The integration between an organisation's customers and an NPD team is important to the success of newly developed heavy construction equipment products. However, the integration between organisations that supply material, components, assemblies and fabrications to new heavy construction equipment developers was found to hinder the market success of newly developed heavy construction equipment. These and other findings suggest several important implications for product development managers and scholars.New product development, innovation, new product success, organisational integration, new product process proficiency, heavy construction equipment industry