Performance in new product development: a comprehensive framework, current trends, and research directions

Abstract

New product development (NPD) is critical for a firm’s competitive advantage. Since the early 1980s, NPD research has steadily increased and has defined successful practices. However, owing to this research field’s fragmentedness, there is ambiguity about what successful NPD looks like. Evidence of the effective design of management control systems (MCS) concerning NPD performance is inconclusive and calls for comprehensive analysis. Yet, there is no holistic framework that covers promising practices and structures. Drawing on a body of 284 article publications, we inductively develop a framework with nine clusters that, taken together, make up NPD performance. These are grouped addressing firm-external and firm-internal phenomena, for instance, cooperation, expertise, and the NPD process. We populate each cluster with variables that are proposed to drive performance, and derive current research trends and paths for future research on NPD. The review makes two contributions to the literature and one to practice. First, the comprehensive framework of NPD performance drivers supports the adjustment of prior general MCS design implications to specific NPD settings. Second, the inductive approach sets this review apart from prior reviews of NPD performance by proposing a holistic framework that is neither biased in a domain, nor in a pre-defined structure. Third, firms will benefit from the framework, because it helps to customize the MCS such that firms can comprehensively evaluate their NPD activities and can enhance performance.