New product development effectiveness: a triadic comparison in the information technology industry

Summary form only given, as follows. The author has analyzed twelve cases of new product and system development processes in the European information technology industry. Japanese and American examples were used as benchmarks against which the European cases were compared. The analysis considered three major dimensions of product and system development effectiveness: market focus in the development effort, overall speed of development, and efficiency in the use of resources. Project management characteristics which affect performance on each dimensions were analyzed. Overall, the performance of European firms in the twelve projects suffered from lack of market orientation and from an insufficient operationalization of concerns for time to market