Gary Lynn

Stevens Institute of Technology · Howe School of Technology Management

This research examines how firms manage crises in new product development (NPD), and suggests that a high level of perceived crisis can result in better new product performance. In addition, the role of team communication is underlined in the relationship between perceived crisis and new product performance. Team communication is categorized into t...

Teams are progressively becoming primary in the way employees in organizations conduct work. We investigated the role of staff personal style in project performance for teams working on incremental and radical innovations. Regression results based on 149 teams suggest that, for employees, conscientiousness and agreeableness, predominantly, seem to...

Purpose Rapid prototyping can potentially accelerate the entire process of new product development (NPD), enabling a high level of customer involvement and hence new product success (NPS). This study aims to examine the relationship between prototyping and NPS, and the moderating effect of customer involvement, as well as the influence of speed of...

One of the most significant current discussions in project management and innovation management literature is New Product Development (NPD) projects, and they are enormously clear environments to be observed the terms of uncertainty, turbulence and volatility. Continuous improvement and learning is vital for NPD project teams and, hence, they are b...

This study focuses on a particularly vexing form of innovation—when the product or process incorporates very sophisticated and advanced technology. Advanced-technology product and process innovation is particularly problematic because of the high costs involved and uncertainties present in terms of engineering, manufacturing, and marketing. The fin...

Developing and commercializing emerging technologies in emerging markets pose an especially difficult challenge for new product professionals. Conventional marketing tools that are typically prescribed to assist the new product manager are severely limited for this extreme form of innovation. This article presents study results and discusses which...

Scenario analysis appears to be an ideal strategic planning tool for emerging technologies in emerging markets, yet it is in its infancy in the business world. This article is one of the first reports on applying this powerful tool to emerging technology business planning. Scenario analysis was incorporated into a PC-based simulation model and was...

Innovation is especially critical, yet risky, in dynamic, uncertain markets where the product or service employs new and uncertain technologies. Under these conditions, the new product professional should rely on a variety of tools and techniques to assist him or her to innovate more effectively with a greater probability of succeeding. The new pro...

Accurate market forecasting can be invaluable to marketing professionals trying to commercialize a new product or service. But what forecasting techniques are associated with successful innovation? Do market forecasting techniques differ for high-tech vs. low-tech products? This research investigates these questions by studying 75 new product proje...

Operations management researchers have frequently suggested that autonomy can motivate teams to actively and flexibly adapt to fast-changing environments, fostering innovation and creative problem solving. However, empirical studies have not consistently supported the benefits of team autonomy. We articulate the behavioral and mechanistic effects o...

As an intriguing concept, organizational sensemaking has attracted many researchers from a variety of disciplines. However, a specific context of the sensemaking concept, a firm's sensemaking capability on technology-related information and strategy development (i.e., technology sensemaking capability) has rarely been reported in the literature. In...

The practice of empowered teams has been advocated as an important tool to address the challenges of today's fast-changing business environment. Empirical studies, however, have not consistently supported the performance benefits of team empowerment. By integrating situational leadership with the structural contingency theory, we propose the perfor...

This study investigates the antecedents and consequences of team learning, which is composed of information acquisition, dissemination, and implementation, in information technology (IT) implementation projects. By investigating 129 IT implementation project teams, we found that (1) information acquisition and information dissemination have a posit...

Research problem: Much of the research on electronic communication media so far has been characterized by a focus on the impact that specific media may have on individuals and teams, as opposed to the impact that multiple media, when used in combination, may have on individuals and teams. Research questions: (1) Does a high degree of media variety...

The ability to develop new products efficiently has become an important consideration in the current atmosphere of constrained budgets and fast-changing environments. New product development (NPD) researchers and practitioners have taken note, but there are limited and conflicting findings on the relationship between the type of NPD framework used...

Variance-based structural equation modeling is extensively used in information systems research, and many related findings may have been distorted by hidden collinearity. This is a problem that may extent to multivariate analyses in general, in the field of information systems as well as in many other fields. In multivariate analyses, collinearity...

Much of the research on electronic communication media so far has been characterized by a focus on the impact that specific media may have on individuals and teams; as opposed to the impact that multiple media, when used in combination, may have on individuals and teams. We contribute to addressing this gap by developing a new theory of media varie...

The concept of corporate vision has been receiving considerable attention in the strategy scholarship. A clear and lofty organizational vision can provide direction to a company and can positively impact its ability to succeed. Yet research on vision at the project level has been curiously lacking. The purpose of this research is to define project...

With the increasing popularity of organizational sensemaking in the literature, sensemaking capability of firms attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields. Nevertheless, sensemaking capability is rarely addressed in the new product development (NPD) project teams in the technology and innovation management literature. Specifi...

An autonomous team is an emerging tool for new product development ( NPD ). With its high degree of autonomy, independence, leadership, dedication, and collocation, the team has more freedom and stronger capabilities to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Several anecdotal cases suggest that autonomous teams are best when applied to highly uncertain...

This paper explores the critical practices impacting a new product team's ability to learn and succeed. By investigating the practices of 281 new product teams from around the world, several factors emerged that impact a team's ability to acquire and use knowledge to reduce cycle time and improve their probability of success. The significant factor...

The concept of corporate vision has been receiving considerable attention in the strategy scholarship. A clear and lofty organisational vision can provide direction to a company and can positively impact on its ability to succeed. Yet research on vision at the project level has been curiously lacking. The purpose of this research is to define proje...

Although empowerment has been championed as a powerful managerial tool, the results of a recent meta-analysis indicate that the relationship between team empowerment and speed of New Product Development (NPD) is far from consistent. In this study, we discussed the relationship among team empowerment, uncertainty and New Product Development (NPD) pe...

New product development (NPD) speed has become increasingly important for managing innovation in fast-changing business environments due to continuous reduction in the product life cycle time and increase in competition from technological advancements and globalization. While the existing literature has not produced consistent results regarding the...

New product development (NPD) speed has become increasingly important for managing innovation in fast-changing business environments due to continuous reduction in the product life cycle time and increase in competition from technological advancements and globalization. While the existing literature has not produced consistent results regarding the...

For many years, past studies have supported the hypothesis that a traditional new product development process increases the odds of faster product launch and greater new product success. More recent studies have shown that an improvisational approach is also associated with a faster and/or successful new product launch. The two schools of the thoug...

Teams developing innovations work in a context ripe with uncertainty, and handling this uncertainty places special demands on the leaders of such teams. We empirically tested the role of leader personality in the success of two different types of New Product Development (NPD) teams: radical and incremental. Using the five-factor model of personalit...

How should a company organize a project team to develop new products? This study examined the relative effectiveness of four types of team structures by comparing the performance of 559 development projects in terms of development cost, new product development speed, and product commercial success. The results indicate that in general, autonomous t...

For many years, the long established referral process for successfully developing and commercializing new products has been called a phased-review or "Stage-Gate" system. The purpose of this article is to test whether improvisation increases the odds of faster product launch and greater new product success throughout this process. Using a specially...

Purpose – Organizational learning and unlearning is a popular and important topic in business as well as academia. Even though there is a plethora of studies on organizational learning, surprisingly little is known about the conceptualization and operationalization of organizational unlearning. The purpose of this paper is to discuss organizational...

Stress is an important research area in the group and organizational behavior literature, yet it is underestimated in the new product development scholarship. In particular, the impact of team stressors on project and process outcomes was not empirically investigated in NPD project teams. In this study, we test the influence of team stressors, cons...

Team learning is vital for organizations in order to compete in fast-paced environments. However, the ways learning can be effective in such environments warrents research, especially for teams developing new products under rapidly changing technological and market conditions. Interestingly, recent new product development (NPD) literature demonstra...

We examined the affect of leader personality on new product development (NPD) project performance under differing conditions of uncertainty. Our model posits teamwork as a mediating variable between leader personality and NPD performance. We hypothesized that the personality variable of openness would have a stronger influence on teamwork and NPD p...

Prior research on the use of electronic communication media by teams performing complex tasks has led to contradictory findings. Much research has suggested that electronic communication media, due to not incorporating important elements found in face-to-face communication, pose obstacles for communication in comparison with the face-to-face medium...

With the increasing popularity of collective memory in the group behavior literature, the transactive memory system (TMS) attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields, in particular, small group research. Nevertheless, the application of the theory of TMS on new product development teams is surprisingly scant. We argue that the...

The study purports to develop and empirically test a model of team learning process and its effects on team performance in new product development teams. Using the socio-cognitive theory of learning in groups and organizations, several hypotheses were tested to show that the primer components of social cognition (that is, information acquisition, i...

We examined the affect of leader personality on new product development (NPD) project performance under differing conditions of uncertainty. Our model posits teamwork as a mediating variable between leader personality and NPD performance.We hypothesized that the personality variable of openness would have a stronger influence on teamwork and NPD pe...

Unlearning, which first appeared almost 30 years ago as a subprocess of the organizational learning process, has received only limited attention in the literature. Rather than building on empirical research, the existing scholarship is largely anecdotal, aimed at reviewing the literature and generating new insights. Further, unlearning studies tend...

Even though an individual's knowledge network is known to contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of his or her work in groups, the way that network building occurs has not been carefully investigated. In our study, activities of new product development teams were analyzed to determine the antecedents and consequences on the transactive memo...

Time-based strategy is becoming an important weapon to achieve competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-changing technology and customer requirements. Speed-to-market has become the mantra of both researchers and practitioners in new product development (NPD), but there are limited and conflicting findings on the relationship betwee...

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We examined the affect of leader personal style on new product development (NPD) project performance under differing conditions of uncertainty. Our model posits teamwork as a mediating variable between leader personality and NPD performance. We proposed that the personality variable of openness would have a stronger influence on teamwork and NPD pe...

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High-tech small- to medium-sized enterprises (SME) make a major contribution to industrial innovation and technological change. Unlike less technologically-oriented SMEs, which occasionally introduce a fundamentally new product, high-tech SMEs, such as advanced electronics and biotechnology first, act as industry change agents and play complementar...

What influences New Product Development (NPD) team success? Research suggests that of the many variables studied those related to the personality of the NPD team leader especially need further consideration. Because NPD teams differ with respect to typical tasks, we empirically tested the role of leader personality in the success of two different t...

Because New Product Development (NPD) teams differ with respect to typical tasks, we empirically tested relationships between the average level of personality variables and (NPD) performance in two types of teams: Radical and Incremental. Using the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality as a framework, results based on a sample of 147 NPD teams sho...

Learning in new-product development teams is cited as being vital in today's competitive, uncertain, and turbulent environments. However, studies on accelerated learning in product-development teams are, surprisingly, lacking. This study proposes a model for accelerated team learning in new-product development based on constructs borrowed from acce...

The concept of corporate vision has been receiving considerable attention in the strategy scholarship. A clear and lofty organizational vision can provide direction to a company and can positively impact its ability to succeed. Yet research on vision at the project level has been curiously lacking. The purpose of this research is to define project...

Although recent empirical research shows the value of empowerment and top management support (TMS) for new product development (NPD) efforts, it remains an open question as to whether empowerment and TMS are always beneficial for NPD performance. In a study of a large number of NPD projects we examined this question by (1) assessing the direct cont...

Organizational learning is a popular topic in business and academia and attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields. Even though organizational learning scholarship is still growing, there are few studies that cross-fertilize social cognition and organizational learning. This investigation examines organizational learning from...

Organizational learning is a popular topic in business and academia and attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields. Even though organizational learning scholarship is still growing, there are few studies that cross-fertilize social cognition and organizational learning. This investigation examines organizational learning from...

By studying the practices of 117 new product teams from AT&T, Allied Signal, Digital Equipment, IBM, Motorola, and other companies, several factors were found that can help teams develop new products and services better and faster, with a greater probability of succeeding. Factors influencing new product success include: 1) teamwork, 2) market nich...

Coming up with fabulously successful products takes more than creative people with groundbreaking ideas. Top executives need to roll up their sleeves and get involved. Since they control resources and have the power to cut through red tape, they can clear a path for the creative team to develop hit products.

Although the role of personality in team performance is not well understood, research suggests that personality plays a critical role in the effective performance of teams. Personality variables should be especially important for new product development (NPD) teams which typically include highly coordinated activities among multidisciplinary member...

Group member change or team stability is a popular and important topic in the group and organizational behavior literature. Team member stability is viewed as a critical factor for an effectively functioning and performing group. Even though there is a plethora of studies on group member change and stability, research on member stability in cross-f...

Speed-to-market is cited as being vital in today’s competitive, uncertain and turbulent environments. To help companies in their quest for speed in new product development, many tools and techniques have been developed. One of the these techniques – team improvisation – is receiving a great deal of attention in both practice as well as theory. Howe...

New product development team learning is important in today’s turbulent and uncertain markets and technologies. However, the literature treats team learning as a single construct, ignoring its multi-dimensionality. In this study, we develop a multi-dimensional team learning framework based on socio-cognitive constructs. By studying 124 new product...

With the increased popularity of the World Wide Web, companies are rushing to have a presence on the Web. However, many companies do not know whether the Web will be effective for them, or what they can do to increase its effectiveness. Few empirical studies have been done on what companies can do to increase the adoption and effectiveness of the W...

The concept of corporate vision has been receiving considerable attention in the strategy scholarship. A clear and lofty organizational vision can provide direction to a company and can positively impact its ability to succeed. Yet research on vision at the project level has been curiously lacking. The purpose of this research is to define project...

Metrics can play an important role in helping companies to enhance their new product development efforts. A new approach applies metrics in several critical areas to measure and improve the performance of new product teams. Some of the metrics include: a team's ability to establish a clear vision, secure team member and management 'buy-in,' record...

This paper explores the critical practices impacting a new product team's ability to learn and succeed. By investigating the practices of 281 new product teams from around the world, several factors emerged that impact a team's ability to acquire and use knowledge to reduce cycle time and improve their probability of success. The significant factor...

Metrics can play an important role in helping companies to enhance their new product development efforts. A new approach applies metrics in several critical areas to measure and improve the performance of new product teams. Some of the metrics include: a team's ability to establish a clear vision, secure team member and management "buy-in," record...

Organisational learning is important, but we know surprisingly little about how to measure or manage it. This paper operationalises organisational learning in a new product development context and tests its effect on New Product Success (NPS) by studying 137 new product development projects. We found that two forms of organisational learning (Decla...

Market forecasting is invaluable to marketing professionals especially when trying to commercialize a new product or service. Accurate foreseeing helps managers develop strategies, identify priorities and allocate resources. But what forecasting techniques are associated with successful innovation? Do market forecasting techniques differ for high-t...

Competition is fierce today. Businesses are feeling extreme pressure to innovate and do so quickly. If they take too long in bringing a product to market or make a mistake along the way, they can be preempted by a faster moving competitor. One technique gaining popularity to help companies compete is establishing learning teams—teams that create an...

Competition is fierce today. Businesses are under extreme pressure to innovate and to do so quickly. If they are too slow bringing a new product to market, or they make a mistake along the way, they could be overtaken by faster moving competitors. But what factors improve new product development success? In a previous study, the authors interviewed...

Large firms have traditionally commanded a competitive advantage in the marketplace over small firms by being able to use their financial strength to perform large-scale market research studies, to design and implement wide reaching advertising campaigns, and to establish computer and information systems to communicate with their staff and supplier...

Summary form only given. This empirical study sets the stages for developing a new product development learning model by incorporating individual learning constructs. Further analysis can be done to expend this simple model and seek to understand better the antecedents of learning-what factors impede and stimulate both procedural and declarative kn...

This paper reports on the development and application of a computer simulation model designed to: (1) assist technical professionals in developing business plans for emerging technologies in emerging markets; and (2) provide a realistic simulation of this process for professional development and university courses in business and management of tech...

The key is having a new-product team that is always learning from past experience embracing new, information, and building on it.

This article explores organizational learning for new product development through a study of thirteen innovation teams from Apple, IBM, and HP. There are three types of organizational learning: Within-Team Learning, Cross-Team Learning, and Market Learning. A new product team need not excel at all three. In fact, under different circumstances some...

OVERVIEW: Successful new product development is tough, especially for truly new products. How can a company successfully develop and commercialize such products? An examination of four radically new innovations - Corning's optical fibers, GE's computed axial tomography, Motorola's cellular telephones, and Searle's (now Monsanto's) NutraSweet - reve...

Individual learning constructs were formulated in an organizational learning context and empirically tested for relationships with new product success. Two constructs, information recording-retrieving and information reviewing, were found to be positively related to new product success. The relevance of these constructs to organizational learning t...

The disappointing performance of U.S. firms during the 1980s in technology-intensive, global markets (such as consumer electronics, office and factory automation, and semiconductor memories) has been widely attributed to a failure to continuously and incrementally improve products and processes. In "The Breakthrough Illusion", Florida and Kenney wr...

While CEOs say that innovation is an important source of future growth for their companies, they devote more than twice as much time to financial planning as they do to new product development. Yet, in an environment typified by increased competition, change, and uncertainty, is it surprising if senior executives do not clearly understand what thei...

Organizational learning is vital for companies to survive. Many scholars and practitioners emphasized that organizational learning is important for competitiveness of companies. However, under some conditions, learning may be insufficient for companies to get competitive power. Companies should think as well as learn to be more competitive. In this...