New Product Development as a Complex Adaptive System of Decisions

By Ian Paul McCarthy, Christos Tsinopoulos, Peter M. Allen, C. Rose-Anderssen. 2006

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Early research on new product development (NPD) has produced descriptive frameworks and models that view the process as a linear system with sequential and discrete stages. More recently, recursive and chaotic frameworks of NPD have been developed, both of which acknowledge that NPD progresses through a series of stages, but with overlaps, feedback loops, and resulting behaviors that resist reductionism and linear analysis. This article extends the linear, recursive, and chaotic frameworks by viewing NPD as a complex adaptive system (CAS) governed by three levels of decision making—in-stage, review, and strategic—and the accompanying decision rules. The research develops and presents propositions that predict how the configuration and organization of NPD decision-making agents will influence the potential for three mutually dependent CAS phenomena: nonlinearity, self-organization, and emergence. Together these phenomena underpin the potential for NPD process adaptability and congruence. To support and to verify the propositions, this study uses comparative case studies, which show that NPD process adaptability occurs and that it is dependent on the number and variety of agents, their corresponding connections and interactions, and the ordering or disordering effect of the decision levels and rules. Thus, the CAS framework developed within this article maintains a fit among descriptive stance, system behavior, and innovation type, as it considers individual NPD processes to be capable of switching or toggling between different behaviors—linear to chaotic—to produce corresponding innovation outputs that range from incremental to radical in accord with market expectations.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff1aabf2e942e172ada57f3fe0fd3ea117423582

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. Anand Nair
2. Esin Sadikoglu
3. Cemal Zehir

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Jamison M. Day
2. M. M. Kristal
3. William J. Sawaya
4. Ian Paul McCarthy
5. Anand Nair
6. Surya Dev Pathak

Citations in the corpus

• Complexity and Adaptivity in Supply Networks: Building Supply Network Theory Using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective (2007, background): “Tan (1999), Chatfield (2001), Iwanaga and Namatame (2002), Rivkin and Siggelkow (2002), Wolfram (2002), Anderson et al. (2003), Skvoretz (2003), Stiller (2003), Chatfield et al. (2004), Chiles, Meyer, and Hench (2004), Mizraji (2004), Thadakamalla et al. (2004), Hordijk and Kauffman (2005), Surana e”
• A Multidimensional Conceptualization of Environmental Velocity (2010, background): “) about the progress and outputs of the process (McCarthy et al., 2006).”
• Organizational Controls and Performance Outcomes: A Meta‐Analytic Assessment and Extension (2018, neutral): “In our view, these results are underpinned by the notion that behaviours are dependent on the complexity involved in a particular system and that these behaviours can interact with controls to influence their functioning (Cardinal et al., 2017; McCarthy et al., 2006).”