Cross‐functional integration offers numerous, well‐documented benefits for new‐product development (NPD), but it also can carry significant costs. Joint involvement of R&D, manufacturing, and marketing personnel can increase the quality, the manufacturability, and the marketability of the final product. However, building consensus among these groups, with their differing perspectives and goals, may require time‐consuming meetings as well as tremendous finesse from the managers who guide the NPD effort. Those managers require an approach to cross‐functional integration that strikes a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. X. Michael Song, R. Jeffrey Thieme, and Jinhong Xie propose that the right mix of cross‐functional involvement may differ depending on the stage in the NPD process. They also suggest that blindly promoting the involvement of all functional areas in all stages of the NPD process may actually decrease NPD performance. They test these propositions in a study that examines the relationships between new product performance and cross‐functional joint involvement between R&D, manufacturing, and marketing in five major stages of the NPD process: market opportunity analysis, planning, development, pretesting, and launch. Their objective in this study is to identify patterns of effective cross‐functional involvement in different NPD stages. The study uses data collected from 236 managers working in the R&D, manufacturing, and marketing departments of 16 Fortune 500 firms. Their findings suggest that new‐product success may be more likely when a firm employs function‐specific and stage‐specific patterns of cross‐functional integration than it is when the firm attempts to integrate all functions during all NPD stages. For example, during the market opportunity analysis stage, the findings suggest that joint involvement between R&D and marketing may be productive, but joint involvement between R&D and manufacturing and among all three functions may be counterproductive. The results also indicate that joint involvement among all three functions either does not have a significant effect on new product success or may be counterproductive in all stages of the NPD process. For the firms in this study, the three functions seem to take turns playing the central role in cross‐functional activities. During the product planning, development, and testing phases, the role of the focal function, or communication hub, shifts from manufacturing to R&D and then to marketing. (c) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.

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The authors are indebted to the three anonymous JMR reviewers for several suggestions.R. JEFFREY THIEME, MICHAEL SONG, and ROGER J. CALANTONE* The authors extend and develop an artificial neural network decision support system and demonstrate how it can guide managers when they make complex new product development decisions. The authors use data from 612 projects to compare this new method with traditional methods for predicting various success outcomes for new product projects.

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We develop a conceptual model of new product development (NPD) based on seminal and review articles in order to answer the question, ''What project management characteristics will foster the development of new products that are more likely to survive in the marketplace?'' Our model adopts Ruekert and Walker's theoretical framework of situational dimensions, structural/process dimensions, and outcome dimensions as an underlying structure. We conceptualize their situational dimensions more narrowly as project management dimensions, allowing us to examine more specifically how project management practices affect the NPD process. In our model, project management dimensions include project manager style, project manager skills, and senior management support. Structural/ process dimensions include cross-functional integration and planning proficiency. Outcome dimensions include process proficiency and new product survival.Our empirical analysis finds support for 20 hypotheses, a reversal of one hypothesis, and nonsignificant results for one hypothesis. These results show that projects are best led by managers with strong technical, marketing, and management skills, using a participative style and enjoying early and continuous support from senior management. These project management dimensions promote cross-functional integration and planning, which are important to process proficiency and new product survival.Our study suggests two broad conclusions. First, it confirms the links in the extant literature between situational (project management) dimensions, structural/ process dimensions, and outcome dimensions in NPD. Second, firms can improve cross-functional integration and planning through various project management practices. Generally, we find that firms interested in improving both proficiency in their development process and the survival rate of new products should take steps to promote cross-functional integration and to improve their planning processes. While the linkage between cross-functional integration and NPD outcomes is well established in the literature, the impact of the planning process on NPD outcomes is a research area ripe with opportunity. Our study highlights three aspects of planning that contribute to NPD outcomes. Plans should be detailed, team members should participate actively in the planning process, and teams should be given flexibility and autonomy to respond to unanticipated issues as they appear.We draw upon seminal NPD articles (e.g., [18,34]) and recent reviews of the literature (e.g., [1,16,27]) for guidance in developing our conceptual model of the influence of project management practices on new product survival. Brown and Eisenhardt [1] categorize NPD research into three streams: rational planning, communication web, and problem solving. They merge these streams into a comprehensive model of the development process. We draw upon their review because it is comprehensive and because it assesses