New Product Quality and Product Development Teams

2000 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajesh Sethi
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Quality ◽  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Information Integration ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
New Product ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
New Product Quality

New product quality has been found to have a major influence on the market success and profitability of a new product. Firms are increasingly using cross-functional teams for product development in hopes of improving product quality, yet researchers know little about how such teams affect quality. The author proposes and tests a series of hypotheses regarding how new product quality is affected by team characteristics (functional diversity and information integration) and contextual influences (time pressure, product innovativeness from the firm's perspective, customers’ influence on the product development process, and quality orientation in the firm). The findings reveal that quality is positively related to information integration in the team, customers’ influence on the product development process, and quality orientation in the firm. New product quality is negatively influenced by the innovativeness of the new product from the firm's perspective. However, information integration mitigates the negative effect of innovativeness on quality. Quality orientation weakens the relationship between information integration and quality. Time pressure and functional diversity do not have any effect on product quality.

Sociological Practitioners Contributing to New Product Development: Mapping the Challenges

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
An Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
New Product ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Usability Research ◽  
Interdisciplinary Process

To continue making profit in industry, companies use extensive research in the development of new products. This complex interdisciplinary process includes some social scientists. By using a SWOT framework as an analytical tool, this paper seeks to summarize the reflections as retrieved from the corpus of scientific publications in which the authors present themselves as sociologists or ethnographers, or as designers or marketers working with sociologists, sociology or ethnography while doing market, consumer, and usability research. This map can be a first step to determine how sociological practitioners can take advantage of the opportunities (e.g. concurrent engineering) in the product-development process through employing their strengths (e.g. context sensitivity), while averting threats (e.g. time pressure) by means of avoiding, correcting or compensating for their weaknesses (e.g. socialization in doing academic sociology).

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