The relationship between marketing and new product development (NPD) is of great significance. It has been widely accepted that it also affects the success of the project or product to a large extent. But yet, this integration is not an easy task and presents lots of challenges to an organization. One of the major barriers is considered to be differences in the perceptions of marketing and NPD employees about each others' tasks and the way they are supposed to cooperate. The study described in this paper is aimed at diagnosing these differences for a particular software products organization. The study has tried to capture these differences for integration behaviours between marketing and new product development (NPD) employees engaged in software product development. The study revealed that there was a significant difference between perception of marketing and new product development (NPD) employees over the current level of information flow from marketing to NPD as well the improvement required in the same. The priorities of marketing and NPD employees for improvement also seem to be quite different which is a serious concern as it can lead to lack of concerted effort in a particular direction. organization's structure, and lack of resources lead to differences in attitudes towards R&D, NPD, manufacturing and marketing resulting in poor tolerance of the other's point of view. This problems gets confounded in the case of software products as they are quite different from conventional products in terms of tangibility, duration of development, and product delivery and distribution mechanism. Though the stage from applied R&D to NPD involves the manufacturing function, this function becomes less distinguishable in case of intangible products like software. In the case of software product development, R&D and NPD are sometimes interchangeably used. This leaves the challenge of coordination and communication between the R&D/NPD and marketing functions. There is a need to study the marketing-NPD interface. Literature describes the collaboration between marketing and R&D as 'integration'. The aim of this paper is to diagnose the status of integration behaviours between marketing and NPD within the software product development team of a large global software services organization.
LITERATURE REVIEWAuthors describe communication, coordination and collaboration between marketing and NPD as 'integration'. Integration has been defined in different ways. It has been described as a symbiotic inter-relation of two or more entities, resulting in the production of advantages, superior to the sum of the advantages of each separately (Souder and Chakrabarti, 1978). According to Gupta (1984), integration is the quality of state of collaboration existing among departments, which is required by environmental demands to achieve unity of efforts.Integration between marketing and R&D/NPD has been studied in different ways. Griffin and Hauser (1996) have described six ways of easing integration between marketing and R&D. Impact studies u...
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