International audienceIn New Product Development (NPD) projects, various partners may be involved at different phases and their participation can lead to either success or failure of the project. Therefore, a company that launches a NPD project has to carefully select the most appropriate partners. Currently, partner selection in supply chains is often performed according to well-known criteria such as cost or delay. However, problems could emerge in such processes due to the unavoidable power disequilibrium of the parties involved. The strongest party will sooner or later force the weaker ones to accept challenging constraints. The use of power will lead to doubtless mistrust and frustration. Therefore, the awareness of the suppliers' power before any collaboration is of upmost importance and in realistic situations it should be used as a high-level selection criterion. This paper argues that the power of partners represents a significant issue for the achievement of a coherent supplier selection strategy. A method is suggested to assess the power of partners based on its performances. The joint use of a power-based selection approach and a performance-based selection approach is illustrated at the end of the paper showing how the power consideration can help decision-makers in selecting more relevant partners
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