New products provide increased sales, profits, and competitive strength for most organizations. However, nearly 50% of the new products that are introduced each year fail. Organizations thus find themselves in a double bind. On the one hand they must innovate consistently to remain competitive, but on the other hand innovation is risky and expensive. Many organizations are forming business alliances to quicken the pace of and reduce risks associated with innovation. Yet by some estimates, 70% of these alliances fail. Many of the prescriptions for successful alliance management clash with recommendations for effective innovation management. The authors develop testable hypotheses by integrating the new products and alliance literature. A construct-cooperative competency-derived from related concepts of mutual adjustment, absorptive capacity, and relational capability is posited as the key factor affecting new product development success, regardless of whether it is an intra-or interfirm endeavor. The authors test the model with data from a sample survey in the semiconductor manufacturing context and replicate it in the health care sector. The antecedents of cooperative competency-formalized and clannish administration, mutual dependence, and institutional support-are revealed empirically and substantiated. The authors identify the importance and means of developing interfirm cooperation.

Using a national random telephone survey of 542 shoppers, examines the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction, and store loyalty within the retail department store context. Tests two complementary models that examine this interrelationship. Empirically examines the relative attitude construct put forth by Dick and Basu. The results indicate that service quality influences relative attitude and satisfaction with department stores. Satisfaction influences relative attitude, repurchase, and recommendation but has no direct effect on store loyalty. Fostering favorable relative attitude and getting customers to recommend the product or service holds key to fostering store loyalty. Results also indicate support for Oliver's four-stage cognitiveaffective-conative-action model of loyalty.

No abstract

No abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to examine competing models of the directionality of influences between customer satisfaction, affective commitment, and the customer's perceptions of risk associated with a service organization. It also aims to include the effects of a customer's prior experience with the organization and experience with other organizations in the service category in the models.Design/methodology/approachStructural equation models of data from a survey to customers of a performing arts organization (sample size=401) are used to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe study suggests that commitment has a positive influence on customer satisfaction and diminishes risk perceptions. There is less support for a model in which satisfaction increases commitment and reduces perceived risk.Originality/valueThere has been recent controversy as to whether customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty. This study provides a different perspective by suggesting that customers with high commitment to an organization use satisfaction surveys to express their loyalty.