Sources, uses, and forms of data in the new product development process Debra Zahay a, * , Abbie Griffin b,1 , Elisa Fredericks c,2 a Marketing Department, College of Business, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA b Department of Business and Administration, College of Commerce, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 350 Wohlers Hall, 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA c College of Business, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA Received 1 July 2003; received in revised form 1 August 2003; accepted 1 October 2003 Available online 9 December 2003 Abstract This paper presents qualitative and exploratory research investigating the role that managing knowledge and information plays in new product development (NPD). A set of 20 in-depth interviews uncovered eight basic types of information used throughout the NPD process and three general approaches to managing information needed in the NPD process. Although some exemplary companies seem to do an outstanding job of collecting and disseminating information, the majority of firms struggle. NPD process automation solutions tackle part of the problem, ignoring nonquantitative data forms and the full picture of information use throughout the entire development process. D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: New product development process; Information management; Knowledge management; Resource-based view; Rich information 1. Background At the 2000 and 2001 Product Development & Man- agement Association (PDMA) International Conferences, companies promoting information management support systems for product development processes occupied a large number of the vendor booths. Different systems included different types of information (project manage- ment, customer, market, financial, etc.), stored information in different ways (in databases vs. in documents), and provided different retrieval options, such as from an internal firm site or from an external site on the Web. From reviewing a number of these systems, it was unclear which one might be ‘‘the best’’ at helping firms manage information in the product development process. Indeed, it was not apparent that any of the systems had been developed based on a full investigation into the informa- tion needs for developing new products. This paper presents the first qualitative and exploratory phase of a multistage research project to understand the role that managing knowledge and information plays in new product development (NPD) and achieving success. In- depth interviews with 20 product developers and product development software providers uncovered eight basic types of information that are used throughout the NPD process and three general approaches to managing information needed in the NPD process. Although some exemplary companies seem to do an outstanding job of collecting and disseminating information, the majority of firms strug- gle. NPD process automation solutions appear to tackle only part of the problem, predominantly ignoring nonquantitative data forms and not understanding how the full set of information is used throughout the entire development process. 2. Introduction Organizations are faced with a dynamic and turbulent environment that requires flexibility to changing business needs. As a contributor to organizational growth, new products represent on average 35% of business-to-business (B2B) firms’ annual sales (Griffin, 1997). NPD continues to garner managerial attention worldwide (Nayak, Brekus, Rosenberg, & Gill, 1993) and is of keen interest to both practitioners and academic researchers. However, failure rates remain high, averaging 40% (Griffin, 1997; Schilling & Hill, 1998). Therefore, organizations continue to search 0019-8501/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2003.10.002 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-815-753-6215. E-mail addresses: zahay@niu.edu (D. Zahay), abbieg@uiuc.edu (A. Griffin), elisa@niu.edu (E. Fredericks). 1 Tel.: +1-217-244-8549. 2 Tel.: +1-815-753-6217. Industrial Marketing Management 33 (2004) 657 – 666