Advancing hermeneutic research for interpreting interfirm new product development

Purpose ? The principal objective here is to describe conceptual and research tools for achieving deeper sense-making of what happened and why it happened ?including how participants interpret outcomes of what happened and the dynamics of emic (executive) and etic (researcher) sense-making. Design/methodology/approach ? This article uses a mixed research design including decision systems analysis, cognitive mapping, computer software-based text analysis, and the long interview method for mapping the mental models of the participants in specific decision-making processes as well as mapping the immediate, feedback, and downstream influences of decisions-actions-outcomes. Findings ? The findings in the empirical study support the view that decision processes are prospective, introspective, and retrospective, sporadically rational, ultimately affective, and altogether imaginatively unbounded. Research limitations/implications ? Not using outside auditors to evaluate post-etic interpretations is recognized as a method limitation to the extended case study; such outside auditor reports represent an etic-4 level of interpretation. Incorporating such etic-4 interpretation is one suggestion for further research. Practical implications ? Asking executives for in-depth stories about what happened and why helps them reflect and uncover very subtle nuances of what went right and what went wrong. Originality/value ? A series advanced hermeneutic B2B research reports of a specific issue (e.g., new product innovation processes) provides an advance for developing a grounded theory of what happened and why it happened. Such a large-scale research effort enables more rigorous, accurate and useful generalizations of decision making on a specific issue than is found in literature reviews of models of complex systems.