The major objectives of this thesis are to answer the following questions :
1. What are the relationships between technical performance and project champion, top's support, and synergy between product and firm's resource?
Furthermore, according to the level of product's technological innovativeness, is there any difference in these relationships?
2. What influence does product's technological innovativeness have on the product's technological/commercial performance and product's characteristics?
3. What are the relationships between commercial performance and synergy variables, product related variables, market related variables, and marketing variables?
Furthermore, according to the level of product's technological innovativeness and considered dimension of commercial performance, is there any difference in these relationships?
The unit of analysis is a project to develop new product and seventy five new product development projects of two consumer electronic firms and one chemical firm were used. Hypotheses were tested using correlation coefficient, t-test, regression, and ANOVA.
The major findings of this thesis are as follows :
1. Top management's support to new product development team plays a critical role in product's technological performance.
2. Synergy between technical ability and new product being developed has major influence on technical success of new product. Here, technical ability means both R&D ability and production ability.
3. The existence of project champion is important for technological performance only in the case of high technological innovativeness.
4. Commercial performance of new product is not uni-dimensional, but composed of financial performance and opportunity window.
5. According to the technological innovativeness of new product, the importance of success/failure factors varies.
6. As supposed in the previous research, marketing activity is the most important determinant of new product success.
But these findings should be interpreted with caution, since this study has several limitations in measurement and sampling method. Further research is suggested and encouraged with more elaborated methodology, and with more suitable samples of new product development.
