New product quality: intended and unintended consequences of new product development speed

This paper focuses on the quality of newly developed products. The study's purpose is to determine how the speed of developing a new product affects its quality debut. Formalization, centralization, formal control, and informal control are included as control variables in the research model. An analysis of a random sample of manufacturing organizations demonstrates that new product development (NPD) speed has an inverted U-shaped effect on new product quality. This means that while superior new product quality is less likely to be achieved when NPD is conducted quickly, slowing down NPD is a double-edged sword as a reduction of NPD speed below moderate levels becomes detrimental to new product quality, as well. In addition, the results show that a new product's quality debut is affected negatively by centralization and positively by informal control. The paper concludes with managerial implications and directions for future research. (C) 2002 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.