The Impact of Asset Specificity, Social Capital and Knowledge Sharing of NPD Partners on NPD Performance: The Moderating Role of Cultural Intelligence

• Main Authors: Shu-Min Li, 李淑敏
• Other Authors: Wann-Yih Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89691860013313823488

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 國際管理碩士在職專班 === 97 === The world markets are in too much turmoil, to be successful and competitive in today’s dramatically changing diverse business environment, firms must develop new products and promote cultural intelligence, especially during this period of economic recession. Buyers are seeking similar but value-added products at a budget price, therefore, developing new produce by investing specific asset, integrating social capital to reduce transaction cost and sharing knowledge to create more value is becoming critical. However, how to identify and provide efficient solutions which actually accommodate customer needs is one of the challenges for firms to gain a competitive edge. Although previous studies have discussed extensively on how to promote the effectiveness of the firm’s new product development (NPD), they tend to take a more piecemeal approach that focus on only very limited constructs, such as team member experiences, commitments and culture, none of these studies have integrated these research constructs into a more comprehensive framework. Consequently, based on current environment, it is important to evaluate the impact of specific investment, knowledge sharing/transfer, social capital, cultural intelligence on the performance of new product development; therefore, nine hypotheses were developed. This study implemented a thorough review of literature and four semi-structured expert interviews at the same stage to construct a more complete research model. In the collected data from 145 respondents who have experience in global new product development project, statistic software, SPSS 12.0, was conducted for various research methods: factor analysis and reliability test and Linear Regression Analysis. The results suggest that NPD performance is influenced positively by asset specificity, social capital and knowledge sharing. In addition, cultural intelligence moderates significantly the effects of asset specificity, knowledge sharing/transfer, social capital, on new product development performance. Managerial implications drawn from the conclusions are: (1) even there is a significant relationship between asset specificity and NPD performance, it is suggested that managers consider more than just specific investment to promote global NPD performance, with cultural intelligence motivation for instance, will be more efficient; (2) structural social capital, comprising social interactions or network ties, contributes more to knowledge sharing compared with that of the other two dimensions, relational and cognitive, therefore, it is imperative for enterprises to create and develop their structural social capital to increase the knowledge sharing and thus promote new product development performance; (3) knowledge sharing through cultural strategic thinking will increase the performance level for a global NPD project. As cultural intelligence can be improved, managers may develop corresponding trainings and create such an environment to help team members and business partners increase the willingness or attitude toward sharing knowledge. Once the capabilities are enhanced, firms then have more chance to improve new product development performance and achieve goals (Guo et al., 2008); and (4) the moderating effect of cultural intelligence to the NPD performance is significant and positive. However, as cultural intelligence has different dimensions, it is suggested that managers should take this into consideration to establish proper solutions for their NPD projects. Suggestions for future research include: firstly, further availability of data from more diverse countries or more globalized insight as well as comparisons; secondly, further evaluation on other dependent variables to NPD performance or conduct focus group interview for more comprehensive discussions and primary data to further identify potential variables; and finally, more attention should be paid to the relationship between integration and NPD performance and other factors that affect NPD performance.