The impacts of speed-to-market on new product success: the moderating effects of uncertainty

Time-based strategy is becoming an important weapon to achieve competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-changing technology and customer requirements. Speed-to-market has become the mantra of both researchers and practitioners in new product development (NPD), but there are limited and conflicting findings on the relationship between speed-to-market and product success. A more important question is whether faster is always better. In a study of 692 NPD projects, we examined the relationship between speed-to-market and new product success (NPS) under different conditions of uncertainty. Our results indicate that speed-to-market is generally positively associated with overall NPS, but market uncertainty moderates the direct effect. Speed-to-market is less important to NPS under conditions of low market uncertainty. Our results also suggest that technological uncertainty does not affect the speed-success relationship. The implication is that it is more important to execute a time-based strategy in an unfamiliar, emerging, or fast-changing market than in a familiar, existing, and stable market. The limitations and future research related to these results are discussed.