Cooperation and the Ability to Minimize the Time and Cost of New Product Development within the Spanish Automotive Supplier Industry

摘要

New product development (NPD) cycle time has become a strategic competitive weapon for corporations and a focus for research on product development management. Reducing NPD cycle time may create relative advantages in market share, profit, and long-term competitiveness. This article follows recent research that already has moved beyond anecdotes and case studies to test factors empirically and variables that are associated with the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. One emerging research area is the impact of comprehensive lists or sets of firm variables (not project variables) on the ability to speed up NPD. At the same time, several authors' findings suggest a contingency approach to speeding up innovation. Contingency theory argues that there is not one "best answer" to a particular problem: Instead, the appropriateness of managerial interventions is dependent on the prevailing conditions that surround that problem. On the issue of NPD, several scholars point out that cooperation accelerates learning and product development: Firms that combine resources can gain a competitive advantage over firms that are unable to do so, and this is viewed as one of the key benefits of interfirm cooperation. A firm's network of cooperations represent a valuable resource that can yield differential returns in the same way as other tangible and intangible assets such as product brands or R&D capabilities. Combining both lines of research, this study seeks to add to the growing literature and further to inform practicing managers in speeding up NPD by analyzing the relationship between cooperation and the use of some NPD firm practices. This article shows the results of a survey of 63 Spanish automotive suppliers to test the moderation effect of cooperation in the relationship between the use of NPD firm practices and the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. Factor and regression analyses were used to test the article's hypotheses. It was found that high-cooperation companies used more intensively sets of firm practices than low-cooperation companies. It also was found that two out of four identified factors of NPD firm practices―Design-Manufacturing Interface and Cross-Functional Design―were related positively to the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities in the subsample of high-cooperation companies but not in the low-cooperation companies. These results support late research in the area of speeding up NPD. The article discusses some implications for managers.