New Product Development Performance

This study contributes to the understanding of New ProductDevelopment (NPD) performance by demonstrating how formal interfirmcollaborative relationships provide access to important informationand how the structure of the formal interfirm network impacts NPDin different ways. The study also develops a dimension of networks,network diversity, and its contribution to NPD performance. Inexploring how NPD performance is affected by information availablebetween firms with formal cooperation agreements, it suggests thattwo aspects of the formal external information network, variety andcontrol, have an impact on a firms NPD performance. Network theoryis used to understand information variety and control during NPD.Analyzing a firms egocentric network of formal relationshipsprovides insight about information availability. Egocentric networkdiversity serves as a proxy for variety of information andegocentric structural holes (connectedness) provide anunderstanding of information control. The study shows that each ofthese factors has a differing relationship with three dimensions ofNPD performance: innovativeness, speed, and marketperformance.