The Organization of New Service Development in the USA and UK

Abstract

We understand a great deal about the organization and management of new product development in the manufacturing sector, but we know relatively little about how applicable this research and practice is to the service sector. In this paper we introduce and test a framework for managing new product development in services. This framework is derived and tested by analyzing 108 service firms in a combined US and UK dataset, and then each national sub-sample separately. Our results generally support the predictive capability of the framework, and suggest that the development strategy, processes, organization and tools derived from manufacturing, specially those of concurrent engineering, are applicable to services. However, the framework better fits the US than UK data, which may question the notion of a 'best practice' applicable to different contexts.product development, services, concurrent engineering, simultaneous development