This study focuses on the 'external activities ' in new product development teams. The term 'external activity' is generally defined as activities which are done by new product development teams to manage their environmental beyond their teams during their development period.
I used semistructured interviews with 9 new product development team leaders in large scale Korean electronics companies, and completed 3 kinds of questionaries.
Then I made a case history in each 9 new product development cases. This case study was conducted based on tentative research model representing the relationships among external activities, performance variables, team characteristics, and task/environmental characteristics.
Through the case analysis, resources acquisition activity, task technical information acquisition activity, market information acquisition activity were found to be important external activities contributing to the teams new product success.
The major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:
1) Not only the high frequency of external activity but also the broad span of external activities' counterpart seems to contribute new product development success.
2) Projects which had begun by top management suggestion, which had high product innovativeness seems to increase new product development teams' external activities.
3) Higher skill variety, and smaller team size seems to increase new product teams' external activities.
4) Lower resource availability, fierce competition, existence of cooperative norm, and no prior development experience seems to increase new product development teams' external activities.
On the basis of these findings, hypotheses and refined research models were generated. In addition, some supplementary findings are presented.
