Product Innovativeness and Entry Strategy: Impact on Cycle Time and Break‐even Time

Abstract

New product development time, or cycle time, has become a critical competitive variable, particularly for small high‐tech manufacturing firms. The business press is filled with examples about large firms that have successfully reduced cycle time. This article investigates the relative impact of product innovation and entry strategy on cycle time and initial market performance of small firms. Using a sample of seventy‐three small manufacturing firms, Abdul Ali, Robert Krapfel, Jr., and Douglas LaBahn find that faster product development is associated with shorter break‐even time. Their results also indicate that these firms are achieving shorter cycle time not by sacrificing product quality, but by keeping the technical content of the product simple. Past research has not taken into account this relationship, and this may be one of the reasons why researchers have often suggested conflicting impact of entry strategy on market performance.

Exploring Proactive Market Strategies : Managing the Market to Create Value

“…It is important to note that both latent and expressed needs may have latent solutions (Narver et al, 2004), and also that the latent solution does not necessarily have to be a new innovation, it is simply a solution that the customer is unaware of (cf. Olson, Walker & Ruekert, 1995;Ali, Krapfel & LaBahn, 1995). Narver et al (2004) describe this proactive approach to satisfying customer needs as implicitly present in the original view of market orientation as well, but argue that it had not been accounted for by most scholars.…”

Asian Social Science, Vol. 4, No. 12, December, 2008

“…This study refer to market innovativeness as the newness of approaches that companies adopt to enter and exploit the targeted market with emphasises the novelty of market oriented approaches. In fact, Ali et al (1995) consider innovativeness as a market based construct and define innovativeness as the uniqueness or novelty of the product to the market. At a broader level, market innovativeness refers to innovation related to market research, advertising and promotion (Andrews and Smith, 1996), as well as identification of new market opportunities and entry into new markets (Ali et al, 1995).…”

“…In fact, Ali et al (1995) consider innovativeness as a market based construct and define innovativeness as the uniqueness or novelty of the product to the market. At a broader level, market innovativeness refers to innovation related to market research, advertising and promotion (Andrews and Smith, 1996), as well as identification of new market opportunities and entry into new markets (Ali et al, 1995). As a component factor separate from product innovativeness, we refer to market innovativeness as the newness of approaches that companies adopt to enter and exploit the targeted market.…”

Antecedents and Consequences of Knowledge Integration in Product Development: An Empirical Evidence

“…Specially, to capture process outcome, we ask product development managers to indicate the extent to which the product development team worked well together, coordinated activities well, implemented decisions effectively, was productive, and used product engineering hours efficiently. These items were previously used by Hong et al (2004) who drawn them from Alder (1995), Ali et al (1995), Crawford (1992) and Tersine and Hummingbird, (1995). To capture value to customer we ask our respondents to indicate in a five point Likert scale, the degree to which the product had a high quality, exceeded customer expectations, created a high customer value (Hong, 2000).…”