"The Impact of Product-Industry Characteristics on Effective Patterns of Product Development"

A product development project can be regarded as a bundle of problem-solving cycles by which an organization tries to construct a "cause map" for a future value-creation (i.e., production-consumption) process. Effective patterns of product development, in this context, means a set of organizational routines that can articulate such a cause map accurately and efficiently, and thereby enhance the chance of the new product's success. It follows that, to the extent that typical patterns of value creation processes differ by industry and product type, effective patterns of product development routines may also differ between them. Based on this contingency perspective of successful product development routines, we collected questionnaire-based data from 203 Japanese product development projects, derived some generic and specific hypotheses from the above framework, and tested them through a simple correlation analysis between 32 effective routine variables and 20 product-industry characteristic variables. The statistical results supported most of our 16 specific hypotheses. Although we need further empirical investigation along this line, the current study is consistent, at least partially, with our contingency perspective: Effective patterns of product development routines may differ when the underlying patterns of value creation processes are different across products, markets and industries.