Marketing and R&D personnel are key actors in the development of new product innovations. Interdependence between the marketing and the R&D functions necessitates integration. Rudy Moenaert and William Souder feel that task specification, structural design and climate orientation are the major integration mechanisms advocated in the literature. Supported by an extensive literature review, they propose a nomological network which interrelates integration mechanisms, interfunctional information transfer, uncertainty reduction and new product innovation success. They develop a causal framework to describe the determinants of successful information transfer between marketing and R&D in the development of technologically new products.

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Technological innovation within the firm can be modelled as a process of uncertainty reduction. The four major sources of uncertainty are user needs, technological environments, competitive environments, and organizational resources. Reducing these uncertainties is the responsibility of the marketing and R&D functions within the firm. Because these functions are reciprocally interdependent, their success in reducing uncertainty requires integration and collaboration between them. A contingency framework is developed which shows the effect and the determinants of interfunctional information transfer. It is argued that the synergistic results of integration can best be understood as a within-role increase of uncertainty reduction, and a between-role convergence of functional uncertainty reduction. The implications of the model are discussed.

Rudy Moenaert, William Souder, Arnoud De Meyer, and Dirk Deschoolmeester report the results of their study of forty technologically innovative Belgian companies to examine the interaction between marketing and R&D. They studied one commercially successful and one commercially unsuccessful technological product innovation project in each participating company and collected data from one marketing and one R&D respondent per project. Communication flows between marketing and R&D are increased under conditions involving formalization of projects, decentralization, positive interfunctional climate, and role flexibility.

This article examines the R&D/marketing interface conditions found within an extensive data base of new product development innovation projects. The incidence of different types of problems between these two important functions are analyzed and the effects of these observations on project outcomes are discussed. The article contains a number of recommendations for increasing the success rates of innovation projects by using a model that improves conditions at the R&D/marketing interface.

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The objective of the present study was to develop a comprehensive empirically-based model of the communication interface between R&D and marketing. Following Moenaert and Souder (Moenaert, R. K., Souder, W. E. 1990. An analysis of the use of extra-functional information by marketing and R&D personnel review and model. Product Innovation Management 7(3, September) 213–229.), a causal model of the antecedents of information utility at the R&D/marketing-interface was postulated. A non-experimental critical incident method was used to test the model. The field survey involved 386 team members of 80 new product innovation teams in 40 companies. Path analysis was used to test the causal model. Support for several aspects of the model were found. First, the relevance and the credibility of the message had strong effects on the perception of information utility. The comprehensibility of the message had a moderate effect on the perception of information utility, whereas novelty had a small effect. Second, the quality of the relationship, the seniority and the prior experience of the message source, and the type of communication channel used had significant effects on the perception of the message. The implications of the research results for managers and researchers are detailed.