Erik Jan Hultink

Delft University of Technology | TU · Head, Department of Product Innovation Management

In the 1960s, influential thinkers defined design as a rational problem-solving approach to deal with the challenges of sustainable human development. In 2009, a design consultant and a business academic selected some of these ideas and successfully branded them with the term “design thinking.” As a result, design thinking has developed into a stre...

Business model innovation is increasingly seen as a key competitive factor in B2B settings. In this context, prototyping, experimentation, and piloting have gained prominence as agile and resourceful methods that can be employed in business model innovation pursuits. Yet, despite increasing interest in this area, and the growing number of large B2B...

Circular business model experiments may help firms transition towards a circular economy. Little is known about how the participants of experimentation – entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovation managers – develop and test their assumptions during the experimentation process to achieve more circular outcomes. Using a design-science approach, we inv...

Next to the redesign of industrial products and processes, sustainable business model innovation is a strategic approach to integrate environmental and social concerns into the objectives and operations of organizations. One of the major challenges of this approach is that many promising business model ideas fail to reach the market, which is neede...

The circular economy may help firms to maximize the value of their material resources and minimize the overall resource use, waste, pollution and emissions of their business activities. Implementing a circular economy program requires radical changes in product, business model and ecosystem innovation. Most research on circular oriented innovation...

In our daily practice of teaching and coaching students how to develop their business proposition for their high tech new ventures, we build on innovation and design sciences. In developing their business proposition, students engage in several activities simultaneously and also change their activities frequently. How can we, as educators, understa...

Brand experience is an important concept in marketing because it can affect brand loyalty, brand recall, and brand attitude. Brand experience design is therefore an important practice for companies to create favourable and meaningful experiences, through the design of various touchpoints that are in line with the brand values. This paper presents a...

Organizational attention to increasing employee well-being (EWB) is a relatively recent phenomenon, which can be linked to the penetration of information technology, its connection to organizational performance, and millennials facing a lack of optimism about the future. Recent research in the field of management has indicated that design principle...

Research contrasting the marketing strategies of foreign and domestic firms within local markets is scarce but is of critical importance to both types of firms. This research examines how intentional cannibalization (IC) functions in Western and Chinese enterprises operating in China and evaluates IC’s impact on radical innovation and subsequent pe...

This paper brings together two streams of literature on trend research and shows how it relates to value creation as well as to dealing with changes in the environment over time in the process of design roadmapping. First, we identify distinct types of trend research. Our analysis of a wide range of empirical and theoretical studies, in the streams...

Refurbishment presents opportunities for designers to improve the sustainability of new and old products via an experiment and post hoc interviews, this research investigates and explores how information about prior use – offered in a visual (signs of wear and tear) or verbal (textual description) form – influences consumers’ evaluations of refurbi...

While the terms Circular Economy and sustainability are increasingly gaining traction with academia, industry, and policymakers, the similarities and differences between both concepts remain ambiguous. The relationship between the concepts is not made explicit in literature, which is blurring their conceptual contours and constrains the efficacy of...

This paper describes the development of the business proposition of high tech new ventures as a design and innovation process. We use the innovation model of Initiation, Design, Engineering and Realization (IDER) to portray the IDER activities that multiple new ventures go through in differing degrees. We conducted two rounds of interviews with an...

Sustainable business model innovation is an emerging topic, but only few tools are currently available to assist companies in sustainable business modelling. This paper works towards closing this gap by bringing together ‘design thinking’ and ‘sustainable business model innovation’ to refine the creative process of developing sustainable value prop...

Since the introduction of open innovation (OI), both firms and academics have widely acknowledged the potential of unlocking large firms’ innovation potential through interactions with external parties, such as young ventures. These asymmetric partnerships are prone to several problems related to communication, roles and responsibilities, cultural...

Wednesday, October 21 2015 marked the particular future point in time that Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled to in Back to the Future Part II. In the 1985 film the director envisioned a future context with many fantastic products, such as flying cars, self-tying sneakers and hovering skateboards. Some of them, such as the 3D movies and fingerprint...

OVERVIEW: Information technology (IT) is the cornerstone of the modern new product development (NPD) process. A new generation of communication and collaboration tools has propagated into nearly all aspects of NPD. To better understand how these collaborative tools, such as wikis, cloud-based file sharing, social networking, blogs, and microbloggin...

OVERVIEW: Young ventures can be highly interesting innovation partners for large firms. However, large firms frequently pursue collaborations with young ventures without a clear action plan, neglecting the challenges that such asymmetric partnerships may bring. Our study identifies multiple opportunities and challenges for large firms that want to...

Service sectors form a considerable part of the world economy. Contrary to the logical assumption that service innovation research should represent a significant share of all innovation research, the vast majority of innovation studies focus on products as opposed to services. This research presents a meta-analysis of the antecedents of service inn...

Cartographic roadmaps used for navigating from A to B provide a strong metaphor for innovation roadmaps used at firms for navigating from the present to the future. Now ready to move beyond this metaphor—the pace and proliferation of knowledge on innovation roadmapping have reached a point at which it would be useful to lay out some groundwork for...

Responses from 152 managers from a wide range of industries were used to test a conceptual model examining the influence of information technology (IT) and non-IT resources on IT capabilities and their subsequent effects on predevelopment stage outcomes. It was found that the resources of IT infrastructure, IT embeddedness, firm's outward focus, an...

Because a premium image is of critical importance for many A-brands in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) categories, it is important for both designers and marketers to have a comprehensive understanding of the package characteristics that can evoke such a premium perception. The present research integrates knowledge from design research and market...

Managing new product development ( NPD ) portfolios is difficult and little is known about how successful NPD portfolio management can improve overall firm performance. Despite regular calls in the literature for more research on NPD portfolio management, what successful NPD portfolio management means and how firms can achieve it remains unclear. F...

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collabo...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of innovation roadmapping from the dimensions of process organization and innovation performance. Taken into account the strategic effectiveness relation between a firm’s roadmapping organization and its innovation performance we conceptualize a grounded framework of innovation roadmapping. Drawing on strategi...

This study investigates the choice of consumer research methods in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of the new product development (NPD) process. First, it delivers an up-to-date overview of currently available consumer research methods for use in the FFE of NPD. Second, using an online questionnaire, we obtain insights into the use of these consumer rese...

This study examines the state of the art in new service development (NSD) research published in the period between 1982, when the first NSD article appeared in an academic journal, and 2008. First, a multisource search was conducted, which resulted in the identification of 145 NSD-related articles. Then, a content analysis was performed of these ar...

Road map:”1: a map showing roads especially for automobile travel. 2. a : a detailed plan to guide progress toward a goal; b: a detailed explanation. (MeriamWebster.com Dictionary, 2008) The roadmap we use for navigating in the car, bringing us from A to B, showing alternative routes, provides a strong metaphor (Meyer, 1984; Cornelissen, 2005) for...

Did you know there are more than 50 video games under the Star Wars brand? Here's a primer on brand extensions in the video gaming industry.

A popular strategy currently employed for new product introductions is co-branding. Such a strategy allows a brand to innovate with the support of a partner brand. The present study investigates how consumers perceive a new product with two brands. Previous research focused on the logic of a brand combination by investigating the impact of the fit...

An increasing number of studies in technology/innovation management contribute to the understanding of the relationship between external technology acquisition and product innovation performance. On the other hand, the meta-analytic reviews of new product development literature indicate a positive impact of product innovativeness on product innovat...

While there is a growing interest in the role of market information processing activities (i.e., the acquisition, dissemination, and use of market information) in new product development (NPD), a number of gaps remain in our knowledge on this topic. When investigating the performance impact of market information processing, most studies have treate...

Portfolio management is the set of activities that allows a firm to select, develop, and commercialize a pipeline of new products aligned with the firm's strategy that will enable it to continue to grow profitably over the long term. To appropriately manage the firm's new product portfolio, decisions must be made about which projects to fund, to wh...

This paper investigates the antecedents and consequences of two product advantage components: product meaningfulness and product superiority. Product meaningfulness concerns the benefits that users receive from buying and using a new product, whereas product superiority concerns the extent to which a new product outperforms competing products. The...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the link between new product launch activities and market success. So far, most empirical research has focused on launch activities that target customer adoption barriers. However, with such a focus the influence of other stakeholders on innovation diffusion is not taken into account. A review of...

This paper describes an exploratory pilot study on the usefulness for designers of three lighting manufacturers’ websites. All three websites contain sections that are specifically directed at professional lighting designers. This study’s first objective is to investigate whether designers experience the websites' content as conducive to the genera...

Development teams often use mental models to simplify development time decision making because a comprehensive empirical assessment of the trade-offs across the metrics of development time, development costs, proficiency in market-entry timing, and new product sales is simply not feasible. Surprisingly, these mental models have not been studied in...

In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the link between new product launch strategy and market performance. So far, new product launch research has focused on this performance relationship without giving much attention to background factors that can facilitate or inhibit successful launch strategies. However, investigating suc...

The guest editor of the special issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) addresses the issues of branding and new product development (NPD). The issue has published four papers that focus on the significant interface between branding and NPD. Three of the four papers are based on qualitative research, making a significant effort...

This article addresses the portfolio management practices and challenges of contemporary firms. Based on a review of the extant literature on project selection, termination and deletion decisions, we conducted an in-depth interview study with 19 key informants in 11 multinational firms. We identified three genres of portfolio management decision ma...

This paper investigates consumer responses to new smart products. Due to the application of information technology, smart products are able to collect, process, and produce information and can be described as “thinking” for themselves. In this study, 184 consumers respond to smart products that are characterized by two different combinations of sma...

This study examines information technology (IT) usage for new product development (NPD) in a global context. Specifically, this research seeks to ascertain the factors that influence IT usage and the relationship between IT usage and new product performance in two different countries—the United States and the Netherlands. The interest here is in di...

This study investigates the impact of nine new product development (NPD) acceleration approaches on development speed. Our findings from 233 manufacturing firms show that 5 approaches (supplier involvement, lead user involvement, speeding up activities and tasks, training and rewarding of employees, and simplification of organizational structure) i...

Development cycle time is the elapsed time from the beginning of idea generation to the moment that the new product is ready for market introduction. Market-entry timing is contingent upon the new product's cycle time. Only when the product is completed can a firm decide whether and when to enter the market to exploit the new product's window of op...

This article addresses the portfolio management practices and challenges of contemporary firms. Based on a review of the extant literature on project selection, termination and deletion decisions, we conducted an in-depth interview study with 19 key informants in 11 multinational firms. We identified three genres of portfolio management decision ma...

This article investigates the antecedents and consequences of two product advantage components: product meaningfulness and product superiority. Product meaningfulness concerns the benefits that users receive from buying and using a new product, whereas product superiority concerns the extent to which a new product outperforms competing products. Th...

Development cycle time is the elapsed time from the beginning of idea generation to the moment that the new product is ready for market introduction. Market entry timing is contingent upon the new product’s cycle time. Only when the product is completed can a firm decide whether and when to enter the market to exploit the new product’s window of op...

Explosive growth of information technologies (IT) has prompted interest in examining the role of IT in new product development (NPD). Through desktop software and Web-based tools, IT has been used to aid idea generation and product testing as well as for NPD activities such as process and portfolio management. Recent research suggests, however, tha...

The proficiency in new product development activities may be the key to the conversion of a market‐oriented culture into superior organizational performance through better new product performance. To examine this conjecture our study tests hypotheses on the mediating effects of the proficiency in new product development activities and new product p...

In the last decade, companies have developed a large number of intelligent products. Due to the use of information technology, these products, for example, are able to work autonomously, cooperate with other products, or adapt to changing circumstances. Although intelligent products appear an attractive category of products, they have received litt...

This manuscript investigates consumer responses to new smart products. Due to the application of information technology, smart products are able to collect, process and produce information, and can be described to ‘think’ for themselves. In this study, consumers respond to smart products that are characterized by two different combinations of s...

This research explores the antecedents and consequences of market information processing during the development process of new high-tech products. To this end, we develop and test a conceptual model for market information processing in three generic stages of the new product development (NPD) process (predevelopment, development and commercializati...

Within the last decade, the link between launch strategies and new product performance has been widely investigated. However, the relationship between resource configurations and launch strategies has received little attention. This study endeavors to fill that void by examining the relationships between resource configurations and launch strategy...

A review of the literature reveals that the relationship between development speed and new product profitability is not as strong and straightforward as conventional wisdom suggests. A number of studies show positive results, others show mixed results, and some present no evidence of a relationship. In other words, the valence of the link between d...

This work investigates the impact of nine new product development (NPD) acceleration approaches (supplier involvement, lead user involvement, speeding up activities and tasks, reduction of parts and components, training and rewarding of employees, implementation of support systems and techniques, stimulating interfunctional cooperation, emphasis on...

The main point this study wants to make is that the use of analogies in advertising for really new products is a more effective means of communicating a new product’s distinctive benefits to consumers than is the use of literal similarity comparisons. This hypothesis was tested by means of an experiment with a 3 (comparison type: explicit analogy,...

To determine how critical predevelopment activities are for a market-oriented firm to achieve superior performance, our study uses data from 126 firms in The Netherlands to investigate the structural relationships among market orientation, the proficiency in predevelopment activities, new product performance, and organizational performance. The res...

Some scholars have suggested recently that a market‐oriented culture leads to superior performance, at least in part, because of the new products that are developed and are brought to market. Others have reinforced this wisdom by revealing that a market‐oriented culture enhances organizational innovativeness and new product success, both of which i...

The quest for success in new product development (NPD) requires management to navigate complex processes. This study presents empirical evidence of the evaluative criteria used by well-experienced NPD managers from the UK and the Netherlands to control performance at different gates of the NPD process. The emerging usage patterns suggest that these...

The slow rate at which many really new products (RNPs) are adopted can at least partially be explained by the low observability of the distinct benefits. It is suggested that between-domain analogies rather than within-domain analogies are effective in directing consumer's attention to the key benefits of and developing preferences for a RNP. The r...

Although several studies have suggested that the sales force is a major contributing factor to new product success, few studies have focused on new product adoption by the sales force, particularly with respect to its relationship with selling performance. The present article presents empirical evidence on the impact of sales force adoption on sell...

Although previous research has investigated the concept and contents of new product performance, there is still no consensus about the managerial decisions that constitute a launch strategy and how such decisions impact new product performance. The research objective for the present investigation is to assess the impact of launch strategy and marke...

Several autonomous products have been launched in the marketplace in the past few years. These autonomous products do not need any human intervention but operate on their own. An example of such an autonomous product is the self-initiating, independent vacuum cleaner that determines when a floor or room needs to be vacuumed, and does the job by its...

This article presents the results of a study on the evaluation criteria that companies use at several gates in the NPD process. The findings from 166 managers suggest that companies use different criteria at different NPD evaluation gates. While such criteria as technical feasibility, intuition and market potential are stressed in the early‐screeni...

Recent research has suggested that analogies may be useful to enhance consumer learning of really new products (RNPs). However, these studies have failed to show convincingly that analogies enhance consumers' comprehension of RNPs as their operationalisation of analogies does not represent a "true" analogy. Besides, they examined the interaction ef...

When firms launch a new product into the marketplace they often aim to find a balance between building scale and provoking extensive and quick competitive reactions. Competitors react to new products when they perceive the product introduction as hostile, committed or when they feel that the product entry will have a large impact on their profitabi...

The importance of successful innovation for the long‐term performance of companies can hardly be exaggerated. However, we need to consider this in a dynamic setting, in which competitors do not remain passive. We find that two thirds of new product launches meet reaction by competitors after their launch. We also empirically demonstrate that the st...

The present study investigates the strategies that eight companies employed in launching new product features in a variety of markets. A literature review shows that launching new product features is an under‐researched area. This lack of attention may be detrimental to companies, as in many mature markets—such as those for durable consumer goods l...

The present study investigates the strategies that eight companies employed in launching new product features in a variety of markets. A literature review shows that launching new product features is an under-researched area. This lack of attention may be detrimental to companies, as in many mature markets-such as those for durable consumer goods l...

Although several studies have suggested that the sales force is a major contributing factor to new product success, few studies have focused on new product adoption by the sales force, particularly with respect to its relationship with selling performance. The present article presents empirical evidence on the impact of sales force adoption on sell...

Although several studies have suggested that the salesforce is a major contributing factor to new product success, few studies have focused on the role of sales managers and salespeople in new product launch, particularly with respect to its relation with performance in new product selling. This article decribes the results of an empirical investig...

For consumer products, strategic launch decision appear more defensive in nature, as they focus on defending current market positions. Industrial product strategic launch decisions seem more offensive, using technology and innovation to push the firm to operate outside their current realm of operations and move into new markets. The tactical market...

Empirical research has demonstrated that a market orientation has in general a positive effect on organizational performance. The potential benefits of a market orientation have, however, not been realized because academics and practitioners do not yet understand the modus operandi that transform market orientation into superior organizational perf...

An investigation is conducted to assess the impact of launch strategy and market characteristics on new product performance and to test the stability of this impact across consumer and industrial products. Data were collected on 272 consumer and industrial new products in The Netherlands through a mail questionnaire approach. Results show that the...

In today's competitive environment, members of the market chain, such as retailers and suppliers, are becoming increasingly powerful. It has been established in the packaged goods area that the ability to get new products on the shelves' is an essential factor in the success of a new product. However, no research exists to date that relates variabl...

The launch strategies of new consumer goods have not been subject to rigorous study, although anecdotes abound in the form of news items in newspapers and specific industry journals. This contrasts with the copious research into new industrial product launch which shows that, prior to commercialization, the process of developing product advantage c...

Focuses on product advantage, a major contributing factor to new product performance, by examining the launch strategies associated with high and low levels of product advantage. Views a launch strategy as integrating protocol decisions, which have steered the course of a product’s development with the tactical marketing mix decisions. Data confirm...

We present a research model that allows the investigation of many of the complexities of new product launch strategies, empirically test for hypothesized relationships among launch strategy decisions, shed light on the ways in which managers tend to build choices among launch decision options into generic launch strategies and link new product perf...

Just as reporters must answer a few fundamental questions in every story they write, decision‐makers in the new product development (NPD) process must address five key issues: what to launch, where to launch, when to launch, why to launch, and how to launch. These decisions involve significant commitments of time, money, and resources. They also go...

The present study focused on the factors that influenced the new product adoption decision by 197 market intermediaries of consumer durables by exploring the relative impact of 27 adoption criteria across four product categories. Next to supporting previous findings, the study significantly extended that body of knowledge in several ways. First, it...

Management is often criticized for overemphasizing short‐term profits at the expense of long‐term growth. On the other hand, although numerous studies have explored the factors underlying new product success and failure, such studies rarely distinguish between short‐ and long‐term success. In fact, little research has been conducted to explore the...

Management is often criticized for overemphasizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth. On the other hand, although numerous studies have explored the factors underlying new product success and failure, such studies rarely distinguish between short- and long-term success. In fact, little research has been conducted to explore the...

The launch strategy for a new product is a crucial decision issue for marketing managers. Little agreement exists however about the content of a launch strategy and about the individual and combined effects of its constituent parts on new-product success. In this study, the relative importance of some launch strategy tactics (pricing, promotion, pr...

This paper advances a framework geared for the analysis of innovation and design. We combine research from economics, where goods and ser-vices have been described as sets of characteristics (e.g., Gallouj & Weinstein, 1997), with studies from the philosophy of technology and de-sign on the dual nature of technical systems (e.g., Kroes, 2002). We p...

The presented study had two purposes. First, it pursued to demonstrate that it is more effective to use analogies in advertisements for really new products to increase consumers' comprehension of the new product's benefits than not to use analogies. Second, it aimed to test the (counterintuitive) assumption that inclusion of product attribute infor...

How can a firm ensure its survival and success in the pursuit of both radical and incremental new products? We propose that the answer to this question lies in the establishment of two important organizational innovation attitudes: firms’ willingness to cannibalize and product knowledge integration. Using data from multiple respondents from 199 Chi...

We develop a general model of how new product development portfolio decisions are made based on four diverse case studies. Previous research has investigated portfolio decisions as individually discrete decisions. We find that portfolio decision-making has to be considered as an integrated system of domain-based processes that produce evidence-, op...