INNOVATION STRATEGY AND THE R-AND-D-MARKETING INTERFACE IN JAPANESE FIRMS - A CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE

This study proposes a contingency model suggesting that a firm's strategic position will affect cross Functional involvement and information sharing between R&D and marketing departments in five major new product development stages, as well as the quality of R&D-marketing relations and organizational structure. To test the model, we surveyed 274 R&D managers and 264 marketing managers in 315 Japanese high-technology firms, The results indicate that, contrary to anecdotal suppositions of Japanese firm homogeneity, Japanese firms differ among themselves and among the strategic types in several important ways, The results also suggest that the level of R&D-marketing integration should be contingent on new product development strategy, making uniform promotion of cross functional team integration questionable. Despite the differences in innovation strategy pursued by aggressive new product developers versus nonaggressive new product developers, all three strategic types rank the stages of innovation in a similar manner, Prospectors, Analyzers, and Defenders put their greatest involvement into commercialization, followed by product development and market research and finally by planning and idea management. Our findings underscore the importance of cross functional integration in maintaining information flows from marketing to R&D on product modifications and from R&D to marketing on product support services across all types of strategies [59], Also, the existence of a hierarchy suggests that the level of involvement per stage may be critical to successful new product development efforts. That is, extreme efforts to encourage integration, such as teamwork, may be highly effective at one stage and counterproductive and costly at another.