Degrees of R&D/Marketing Integration and Firms’ Economic Performance

According to Michael Porter, any firm that wants to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace could adopt differentiation, focus, or cost leadership strategy. No matter which strategy a firm uses, the internal organizational structure should match it in order to perform the strategy effectively. The need or technical differentiation and a good market niche underline the importance of a cooperative partnership between R&D and marketing people. Unfortunately, the relations between R&D and marketing are conflicting rather than cooperative in many firms. This study tries to investigate the relationship between degrees of R&D/marketing integration and firms’ economic performance. Pearson Correlation was used to test whether there exists a significant correlation between integration factors and performance indicators. ANOVA was used to test if high-integrated firms perform better in all the performance indicators than mid-and low-integrated firms. The results show that adaptability is positive and significantly correlated with organizational structure and senior management support. Efficiency is positively correlated with the quality of R&D/marketing relations and negatively correlated with organization structure. But effectiveness is only positively correlated with the quality of R&D/marketing relations. Besides, the results also show that high-integrated firms do not always perform better than mid-and low-integrated firms in every performance indicators.