Market Vision and Market Visioning Competence : Impact on Early Performance for Radically-New, High-Tech Products

Having the “right” Market Vision in new product scenarios involving high degrees of uncertainty has been shown to help firms achieve a significant competitive advantage, which can ultimately lead to superior financial results. Despite today’s increased rate of radical innovation, and hence the importance of effective vision, relatively little research has been undertaken to improve our understanding of this phenomenon. This investigation responds to this research gap by focusing on Market Vision (MV) and its precursor, Market Visioning Competence (MVC), for radically new high-tech products. Two stages of research, exploratory and empirical, define MV as “a clear and specific mental model/image that organizational members have of a desired and important product-market for a new advanced technology,” and MVC as “a set of individual and organizational capabilities that enable the linking of advanced technologies to a future market opportunity”. Based on samples of high-tech firms involved in early technology developments, the measurement study indicates that five factors comprise MV (Clarity, Magnetism, Specificity, Form, Scope) and four factors underlie MVC (Networking, Idea Driving, Proactive Market Orientation, Market Learning Tools). Structural equation modeling is used to demonstrate that MVC significantly and positively impacts MV, and that each of these constructs significantly and positively influences certain aspects of Early Performance (EP) in NPD. This is the first empirical study to develop a comprehensive set of scales to measure these constructs and then to combine them in a model by which to examine their inter-relationships