Translated Abstract
New product development (NPD) is critical for achieving competitive advantage even for survival, especially for firms in technology driven industries. In order to improve NPD efficiency and effect, how to execute NPD effectively has been an arduous problem for scholars and practitioners. Because of the excellent performance of quality management in manufacturing process, practitioners anchor their hopes on quality management to improve product development process. Some studies begin to explore the influence of quality management on NPD and innovation.Literature suggests that there are different points in the studies on the relationship between quality management and NPD, and scholars do not understand how quality management influence NPD. According to this, this paper analyzes the possibility of executing quality management in NPD process and investigates the influence of quality management on NPD capability and innovation drawing on quality management theory, resource-based view, and dynamic capability theory. Based on the literature review, this paper further identifies quality management practices which can be used in the NPD context and have significant influence on NPD. And then, the author develops a mechanism model incorporating the relationship between quality management, NPD capability, and innovation. The research hypotheses are also proposed based on the conceptual model. Finally, with the abidance of China National Institute of Standardization (CNIS), the conceptual model and the hypotheses are examined with the data collected from firms. Moreover, this paper introduces an integrated approach linking structural equation modeling (SEM) to Bayesian network (BN), and provides a management diagnosis function and a more accurate analysis of the results of SEM.The main findings and contributions of this study can be summarized as follows.First, based on the existing quality management theory, this paper analyzes why and how to execute quality management in the NPD context using resource-based view and dynamic capability theory. In this paper, the author regards the execution of quality management practices (Particularly the execution of infrastructure quality management practices) as firms’ inimitable resource, and identifies the influence of infrastructure and core quality management practices on NPD. The results indicate that infrastructure quality management practices have a positive and significant influence on NPD capability, while the core quality management practices have a negative but insignificant influence on NPD capability. This finding explains why the conclusions of different studies are inconsistent and even conflictive, extends the existing quality management theory greatly, and offers a scientific explanation why quality management can be executed effectively in the NPD context.Second, using the dynamic capability theory, this paper incorporates NPD capability into the relational model of quality management practices, NPD practices and NPD results creatively, and reveals the influencing mechanism between quality management, NPD practices and NPD results. This finding contributes to existing studies on quality management and NPD, and provides guidance for successful NPD improving firm performance through building NPD capability.Third, as two main NPD practices, concurrent engineering and design-manufacturing integration have a significant influence on NPD capability. Contrary to our expectation, the influence of concurrent engineering on NPD capability is positive while the influence of design-manufacturing integration on NPD capability is negative. This result is inconsistent with existing opinion of “cross-function integration can facilitate NPD and /or innovation”. In this paper, the author proposes that not all kinds of integration contribute to any type of NPD project. The effect of cross-function integration depends on firms’ situation, the characters of new product, the degree of integration, etc. this finding extend existing literatures on cross-function integration, paves the way for the view of “contingent integration”, and provide guidance for implementing cross-function integration effectively in the NPD context.Fourth, this paper introduces an integrated approach linking structural equation modeling to Bayesian network. This integrated approach inherits the capability of structural equation modeling in empirical validation and the capability of Bayesian network in prediction, diagnosis, and nonlinear relationship, and overcomes the limitations of structural equation modeling in modeling cause-effect relationship, that structural equation modeling can not predict relationship accurately, is not suitable for non-linear relationship, and can not deal with diagnosis. Moreover, using this integrated approach, the managers can make decisions effectively based on management diagnosis.
Translated Keyword
[Quality management practiceNew product development practiceNew product development capabilityBayesian network]
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