The impact of formally documented NPD processes, decision-making centralisation and NPD performance on organisational competitiveness

The focus of our research is to better understand factors that appear to impact the success of new products. We specifically investigate what happens to four measures of new product success when viewed through the lenses of several important factors associated with the NPD process. We suggest that a workable understanding of factors that discriminate between more and less successful new products can increase a firm's competitiveness. Survey instruments were received from NPD managers employed by 91 firms that were randomly selected from a sampling frame of 415 organisations primarily operating in the US medical devices industry. Our research suggests a firm's decision making centralisation and an organisation's new product development (NPD) process formalisation and documentation do not discriminate between the more successful and less successful products in the medical devices industry. Moreover, overall marketing performance does not discriminate between more successful and less successful products but technical performance does.