Managing innovation in the medical device industry

Over the past decade a number of authors have pointed out that innovation and new product development (NPD) processes are important to organizational survival (Cooper, 1996). Such importance has led to the investigation of new product success by these and other scholars in an effort to determine what factors are important to NPD success (Parry and Song, 1994). A number of studies have suggested that important relationships exist between proficiently performed NPD activities and the success of new industrial projects (Rochford and Rudelius, 1997) and between innovation success and the degree of integration among organizations that participate in a new product development effort (Song, Neeley and Zhao, 1996). Most of the previous research has focused on either organizational integration and new product success or NPD process proficiency and new product success. This study combines previous research involving new product development proficiency and organizational integration and brings it current with empirical data from the medical device industry