Product Development as Core Competence: How Formal Product Development Practices Differ for Radical, More Innovative, and Incremental Product Innovations* Patricia J. Holahan, Zhen Z. Sullivan, and Stephen K. Markham Although universally recognized as an important consideration in building product development (PD) competency, the effect of a firm’s ability to vary its PD practices to develop winning products has been given scant attention in large-scale, multiorganizational, quantitative studies. This research explores differences in formal new PD practices among three project types—incremental, more innovative, and radical. Using a sample of 380 business units, this research investigates how development practices differ across these three classes of innovation with respect to the formal PD process, project organization, PD strategy, organizational culture, and senior management commitment. Our results diverge from several commonly held beliefs about formal PD processes and the management of radical versus incremental innovations. Our results indicate that radical projects are managed less flexibly than incremental projects. Instead of being an offshoot of less strategic planning, radical projects are just as strategically aligned as incremental projects. Instead of being informally introduced entrepreneurial adventures, radical projects are often the result of more formal ideation methods. While these results may be counterintuitive to suppositional models of how to radical innovation happens, it is the central theme of this research to show how radical innovation actually happens. Our findings also provide a foundation for reexamining the role of control in the management of innovation. As the level of innovativeness increased, so too did the amount of controls imposed—e.g., less flexibility in the development process, more professional, full-time project leadership, centralized executive oversight for new products, and formal financial assessments of expected NP performance. T his research explores differences in new product development (NPD) practices among three project types or levels of innovativeness— incremental, more innovative, and radical innovations. Researchers argue that the development of radical inno- vations is a fundamentally different process than the development of incremental innovations. In fact, several researchers argue that what may be best practice for the development of incremental innovations may be detrimental to the development of radical innovations (O’Connor, Rice, Peters, and Veryzer, 2003; Veryzer, 1998). Accordingly, researchers have sought to document differences in development practices for these two classes of innovations (O’Connor and Rice, 2001; Reid and de Brentani, 2004; Song and Montoya-Weiss, 1998). However, much of the research that has looked at devel- opment practices for radical innovations consists of quali- tative case studies (e.g., O’Connor, 1998; O’Connor and Rice, 2001; O’Connor and Veryzer, 2001; Trauffler and Tschirky, 2007). Because these case studies involve so many different types of innovations, developed at differ- ent times and under very different circumstances, they provide only a preliminary understanding of how devel- opment of best practice may indeed differ for different innovation types. Interestingly, despite the fact that it is commonly touted that differing levels of uncertainty or inno- vativeness require different approaches to innovation and NPD, current models of formal NPD processes do not reflect this complexity. This deficiency is character- istic of the article by Kahn, Barczak, and Moss (2006), who offer an NPD best practices framework. In their rejoinders to the Kahn et al. article, Kleinschmidt (2006) and Peters (2006) both point out that NPD projects that entail differing types of uncertainty warrant different approaches to development. Indeed, Kleinschmidt calls for a revised NPD best practices framework that explic- itly takes into account how product development (PD) Address correspondence to: Patricia J. Holahan, Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030. E-mail: patricia.holahan@ stevens.edu. Tel: 201-216-8991. * The data used in this study were collected in conjunction with the Product Development and Management Association Research Founda- tion’s Comparative PerformanceAssessment Survey. We wish to thank the Foundation for permission to use these data. J PROD INNOV MANAG 2014;31(2):329–345 © 2013 Product Development & Management Association DOI: 10.1111/jpim.12098