THE IMPACT OF MARKET ORIENTATION ON CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT AND NPD SUCCESS

The ability to develop and understand customer new product preferences in response to changing market trends is shown to be as a key to new product success. Given the significance of developing customer preferences and the increasing use of cross-functional new product teams in the NPD process, the authors examine how customer knowledge development is affected by characteristics of cross-functional new product teams in a market-oriented organizational context. On the basis of a study of 228 new product project managers in the R&D or marketing area, the authors find that customer knowledge development is positively influenced by customer orientation, competitor orientation, and cross-functional integration. Interestingly, lead users' involvement has a positive quadratic effect on customer knowledge development in terms of marketing respondents. However, cross-functional integration weakens the positive effects of both customer orientation and competitor orientation on customer knowledge development. Our results also reveal a clear R&D–marketing split on the main effect of the proposed antecedents.