How to prevent ruining new product development projects with suppliers? A failure factors’ perspective

To efficiently implement Early Supplier Involvement (ESI) in New Product Development (NPD), literature examined the contribution of its success factors to NPD project performance. However, prior studies overlooked the compromising effects of ESI failure factors that should also be carefully managed to foster project performance. Following an in-depth literature review, we identify 16 failure factors and position them according to the collaboration phases, namely relationship design and day-to-day interactions. Then, based on data collected from a survey with 80 practitioners, we use Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) to determine the degrees of risk criticality for each factor with respect to different thresholds of NPD project performance in terms of cost, quality, time and innovation. As such, we unveil the failure factors most detrimental to the project success, and provide practitioners with guidance to mitigate the ESI failure factors according to the performance criteria they prioritize the most and the performance levels they target.