Towards a theory of managing information in new product development

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with various information aspects of new product development (NPD). In total, the thesis consists of 6 research articles appended in full, and an introductory text that integrates and theorizes with and from these papers.The first paper is a review article examining the literature on and role of information in NPD. The main argument put forward here is that information processing can be understood in terms of three steps: acquiring, sharing, and using information. The second paper is a largescale survey that examines the relationship between market and entrepreneurial orien-tation and performance in NPD. A market orientation is to a large extent about acquiring, disseminating and using market information, while an entrepreneurial orientation partly is about ignoring such information, and instead trying to be innovative, proactive, and take risks. The results show that a market orientation and innovativeness are positively related to NPD performance, and that neither product nor environmental characteristics moderate these relationships. The third paper is also a survey, and investigates the extent to which management of external information is associated with innovation performance. The main findings are that scanning the technological sector of the environment was positively associated with innovation performance, while scanning customers, suppliers, and competitors proved to be negatively correlated with innovation performance. Crossfunctional integration in the form of collaboration as well as using information from the industry environment also proved to be positively related to innovation performance.The last three papers have a centre of gravity in “management of information & environ-ment”, and not so much in new product development per se. Paper four describes and com-pares different information processing approaches (e.g. environmental scanning, marketing research) in order to identify their similarities and differences, but also their underlying con-cepts and the course of events they represent. The main conclusion is that differences exist primarily in terms of focus and scope. Paper five is a review and tentative integration of different perspectives in organization – environment research: the adaptive, the resource-dependence, the cognitive and the population-ecology perspective. The review identifies differences and similarities among these perspectives, suggests tentative conclusions on why the adaptive perspective is so frequently utilized at the expense of the other three, and suggests constructivism as a feasible avenue for combining and integrating these perspectives. Finally, the sixth and final paper deals with information use in the context of strategic decisionmaking. With a case study approach, the questions of why information is used, what kind of information is used, where it is obtained, and how it is obtained were addressed, and the results from this paper are mainly descriptive.The purpose of the introductory text is two-fold. In addition to providing integration of the appended papers, the main purpose is theory construction (i.e. elicitation of constructs and propositions). In the introduction, all six appended papers together with a new literature search and a new pilot case study are used to generate propositions about management of information, information sources, and the need for cross-functional integration in three different phases of the NPD process. In addition, suggestions regarding theoretical connections are made. The introduction text concludes with reflections, managerial implications, limitations, and future research.