Customer oriented, but losing sight of the big picture: how lack of ‘outside’ validation can limit market information processing in NPD teams

NPD teams enhance their change of success when they process rich and diverse market information in the course of a new product innovation trajectory. A large body of literature has advocated that including this information, such as insights on developments in market segments and customer needs regarding product applications, in new product decisionmaking is critical for new product performance. Contrary to earlier findings this is not only the case for incremental NPD but also for their really new counterpart. Additionally, research has focused on within NPD team practices that allow firms to be market oriented innovators, hereby focusing on cross-functional integration, project priority setting, and using the right market research tools. However, the practice of innovation is complex. NPD teams have to spread attention and processing enough market information can easily be overlooked. Against this backdrop we present a comparative longitudinal case-study which provides detailed insights of two new product trajectories, Shield and Anti-resist, in one chemical firm, ChemCo. We illustrate what market information was processed over the course of the two innovation processes. We find that project members in Anti-resist processed a larger variety of market information when compared to the ones in Shield, especially in the early phases of the project. In due course this led to the Anti-resist team being able of introducing the product into the market while Shield was put on hold. Lack of market information processing in Shield was not due to within NPD team factors which have been a focus point of previous literature. Project members in Shield, in comparison to the ones in Anti-resist, were less proactive in validating their market information processing practices with the wider organizational context ‘outside’ the NPD team in the course of the innovation trajectory by means of using a formal NPD protocol and interacting with ChemCo’s senior management. While marketing literature has praised decentralization for enhancing market information processing, our main contribution to the literature on market oriented NPD is that this comes with the responsibility of individual NPD teams to proactively validate their own marketing actions along the way.