Abstract

This research project investigated environmental, strategic, organizational, and project team predictors of market entry timing and benchmarks for comparison in six electronic industries. We studied entry into new product generations and response to competitors' entry since 1985 by firms from the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and The Netherlands. The fastest firms to market served well understood markets, and competed in more highly concentrated industries. Beyond these characteristics, firms from different countries used different approaches to achieve speed. However, both U.S. and Japanese firms increased both team diversity and integration during the earliest stages of product development. Overall, these results suggest that the fastest product development teams were those that focused early on known customer requirements and then tightly controlled the product development effort to early completion.


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more_1193.pdf