The role of top management team's information technology (IT) infrastructure view on new product development : Conceptualizing IT infrastructure capability as a mediator

Purpose – The purpose of this paper it to investigate how sophistication of top management view on information technology (IT) infrastructure influences the firm's IT infrastructure capability and the effect of IT infrastructure capability on new product development (NPD) process outcomes such as cost, cycle time, and quality. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from research‐based and knowledge‐based theories, a conceptual model on how IT infrastructure influences NPD process efficiency is developed. Findings – The paper demonstrates that sophistication of top management view on IT Infrastructure enhances NPD process through its effect on IT infrastructure capability. IT infrastructure capability enhances the NPD process efficiency by reducing the cycle time and cost of NPD projects and improving the NPD process quality. Practical implications – It is useful for practitioners to know that by adopting an enabling IT infrastructure view, managers can create IT infrastructure capabilities that could improve their NPD processes significantly. Research limitations/implications – Future research should conduct empirical analysis of this paper's propositions and could examine what moderates the relationship between the sophistication of the top management's view on the firm's IT infrastructure and IT infrastructure capability. Scholars could also include firm performance as the final outcome of the influence of IT infrastructure view when testing the proposed model empirically. Originality/value – Recent research pointed out that IT enabled the development of efficient new processes. This paper extends this argument by conceptually investigating how IT infrastructure enhances NPD process of a firm.