Ana I. Rodríguez-Escudero

Criteria Employed For Go/No-Go Decisions When Developing Successful Highly Innovative Products

Based on a sample of 77 highly innovative products, this study examines the usage and the relative importance of a set of go/no-go decision criteria at four major gates of the new product development (NPD) process. The findings reveal that go/no-go criteria can be grouped into five dimensions: strategic fit, technical feasibility, customer acceptance, market opportunity, and financial performance. Strategic fit dimension is mainly applied in approving the new product concept. Technical feasibility dimension is crucial in approving the new product concept and the product prototype. The usage of customer acceptance dimension is notably high throughout the entire development process, particularly after product launch. Market opportunity dimension is mostly employed to approve the new product concept and the maintenance of the product on the market. Financial performance dimension stands out near the end of the development process.

Performance Effects of Involving Lead Users and Close Customers in New Service Development

Customer involvement has been recognized as a key factor for successful service development. One important aspect affecting the outcome of new service development (NSD) projects in whose development customers are involved is the choice of the appropriate participating customer. This study examines the effect of two customer’s characteristics (relational closeness and lead-userness) on four indicators of new service performance. The paper uses data from 102 NSD projects. Covariance-based path analysis is used to test the model. Results reveal that involving close customers in the NSD process has a positive direct effect on service advantage and speed to market and a positive indirect effect on market performance. The involvement of lead users, on the other hand, has a positive effect on service newness and service advantage, and a negative effect on market performance. Findings from this study suggest that firms need to make conscious choices about the types of customers to involve in service innovation as different types of customers affect new service performance differently.

Order and scale of market entry, firm resources, and performance

This paper aims to examine whether order and scale of market entry influence a new product?s market and financial performance, and how marketing and R&D resources strengthen or weaken these effects. Through a mail survey, data were collected on a sample of 136 product launches by Spanish manufacturing firms. A moderated hierarchical regression analysis enabled the assessment of the relevance of order and scale as well as their interactions with marketing and R&D resources to explain a product?s competitive position. Moreover, a mediation analysis allowed us to determine whether market entry strategy (indirectly) affects financial performance. The analyses show that pioneering firms and those entering the market with a full-scale launch achieve advantages in terms of competitive position, and that this variable mediates the relationship of order and scale with profitability. The empirical results also reveal that such advantages are conditioned by the availability of marketing and R&D resources. The decisions regarding order and scale of market entry are contingent. Managers involved in the planning of a new product launch should be knowledgeable about their firm?s resources and capabilities before determining when and how to enter the market. Many papers study the effects of order-of-entry on market share, but other dimensions of a new product launch strategy, such as scale, have largely been ignored. The research examines the effects of both variables on competitive position and profitability. This is also one of the first studies that explores the moderating effect exerted by resources and capabilities in the launch strategy-performance relationship.

The effects of managerial output control and team autonomy on the speed of new product development: the moderating effect of product newness

This study examines the individual and combined effects of output control and team autonomy on the speed of New Product Development (NPD). The study also explores the moderating effect of product newness. The results, which are based on sample of 247 new product projects, indicate that output control is positively related to NPD speed. The positive relationship between output control and NPD speed is greater for low innovative products than for high innovative products. Team autonomy has a positive impact on the speed of new product development only when managerial output control is high.

The individual and joint effects of process control and process-based rewards on new product performance and job satisfaction

An important issue facing innovation managers is how to exercise adequate managerial control over new product development (NPD) teams in order to ensure that project goals are met. The current study advances research on this subject matter by analyzing the individual and joint effects of process control and process-based rewards on job satisfaction and four measures of new product performance. Findings from our study reveal that process control and process-based rewards can have either positive or negative effects depending on the type of performance outcome considered. Thus, process control is beneficial to new product quality but detrimental to adherence to budget, adherence to schedule, and teams job satisfaction. Interestingly, our results suggest opposite effects for process-based rewards. In terms of their joint effects, results suggest that firms should only combine process control and process-based rewards when their goal is to develop new products with high quality.

Training and its consequences on the innovative capacity of entrepreneurs

With the objective of improving competitiveness, industries require entrepreneurial projects which are preferably characterised by high levels of innovation. One way of enhancing innovative capacity is to use training programmes which meet the specific needs of those individuals who lead the projects. In this paper, our aim is to study what type of entrepreneurship training is most appropriate in order to reinforce such a capacity. Additionally, we control if formal education and knowledge heterogeneity have an effect on innovation capacity. To achieve our main objective, we used a sample of 354 entrepreneurs from the Castile and Leon region (Spain). The results lead us to recommend that the training centres and institutions which organise entrepreneurship training programmes should give preference to specific entrepreneurial training - and not as much to general training in business aspects - when they wish to strengthen the innovating spirit of the entrepreneurs.

Brand deletion: How the decision-making approach affects deletion success

Literature on brand deletion (BD), a critical and topical decision within a firms marketing strategy, is extremely scarce. The present research is concerned with the decisionmaking process and examines the effect on BD success of three different approaches to decisionmaking – rational, intuitive and political – and of the interaction between the rational and political approaches. The moderating effect of the type of BD – i.e., total brand killing or disposal vs. brand name change – is also analyzed. The model is tested on a sample of 155 cases of BD. Results point to positive effects on BD success of both rationality and intuition, and a negative effect of politics. Findings also indicate that the negative impact of political behavior on BD success is minimized in the absence of evidence and objective information and when the BD is undertaken through a brand name change.

New Technologies and Entrepreneurial Intention

New technologies are powerful tools to create, disseminate, articulate, and exploit knowledge. Entrepreneurs use these technologies to promote the creation of new ventures. However, recent studies demonstrate that new technologies are not sufficient to enhance the process of venture creation. We use the fundamentals of the theory of planned behavior to understand the impact of new technologies on entrepreneurial intention. Empirical literature related to university students shows that entrepreneurial intention is dependent on attitudes toward entrepreneurship, social norms, and self-efficacy. We therefore evaluate an empirical model in a sample of students enrolled in the 2012–2013 academic year in the University of Valladolid (Spain).