Factors Affecting the Performance of New Product Development Teams: Some European Evidence

New product development often necessitates activities that are performed by different departments or units within the same or between different organizations. To counteract coordination and communication problems that may arise across unit boundaries, many enterprises introduce cross-functional new product development (NPD) teams to direct and control the development process. The objective of this work is to address the lack of attention paid to the innovation processes that occurs within organizational teams, when examining innovation in organizations. Most studies focus on individual, organizational, or even interorganizational-level conceptualizations to examine innovation in organizations (Organization Science 3(3): 383–397, 1992; Academy of Management Journal 48(2): 346–357, 2005), thus failing to identify the crucial role that teams play during innovation development. To this end, we review those factors that exert important influences on the functioning and performance of NPD teams, and we illustrate their relevance by providing concrete evidence from large European organizations that actively engage in collaborative new product development. These illustrations are extracted from Innovation Impact, a major research project focusing on collaborative R&D comprising over 70 detailed case studies from all over Europe (Innovation Impact – Final Report, European Commission, DG Entreprise, 2008).