The impact of product-process complexity and new product development order winners on new product development performance: The mediating role of collaborative competence Atanu Chaudhuri a, *, Harry Boer b a Center for Industrial Production, Aalborg University, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen, Denmark b Center for Industrial Production, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 10/2.02, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 6 January 2015 Received in revised form 21 October 2016 Accepted 24 October 2016 Keywords: NPD order winners Product-process complexity Collaborative competence NPD performance ABSTRACT The role of New Product Development (NPD) order winners and product-process complexity as antecedents of collaborative competence has not been explored in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to test the mediating effect of collaborative competence on the relationships between NPD order winners and product-process complexity, and NPD performance. The paper analyses data from 343 manufacturing plants in Asia, collected as part of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS VI) in 2013–2014. The results show that NPD order winners and product-process complexity affect NPD performance directly as well as through the mediating effect of collaborative competence. ã 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction New product development (NPD) is the process of developing, producing and delivering new products to the market. A myriad of models has been proposed to describe or manage the NPD process. Most of these models are activity-stage (Saren, 1984) or stage-gate models (e.g. Cooper, 2008). Whereas the need for internal functions to collaborate in the process has been unchallenged since the emergence of Concurrent Engineering and similar concepts in the 1980s, ever more authors also emphasize the importance of external collaboration, i.e. with suppliers and customers. However, internal and external collaboration do not unambiguously lead to positive outcomes. Some authors report positive effects (Dröge et al., 2004; Koufteros et al., 2005; Mishra and Shah, 2009; Lau et al., 2009; Johnson and Filippini, 2013), others mixed results (Fang, 2008), yet others even a negative impact (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi,1995). Behind the ambiguous reports may be differences in conceptualization, operationalization, measurement, analytical method and/or lack of consideration of specific antecedents. Developing and improving collaborative competence can be considered as one of the action programs firms may implement in order to translate NPD related strategic goals and priorities into action and also to deal with product and process complexities. But, the role of these antecedents to collaborative competence in the context of NPD has not received adequate attention. Thus, in this paper, first, the effects of two possible antecedents of internal and external collaboration, NPD order winners and product-process complexity, respectively, are investigated. Furthermore, the possible mediating role of collaborative * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: atanu@business.aau.dk, atanuch1@yahoo.com (A. Chaudhuri), hboer@business.aau.dk (H. Boer). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jengtecman.2016.10.002 0923-4748/ã 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. J. Eng. Technol. Manage. xxx (2016) xxx–xxx G Model ENGTEC 1478 No. of Pages 16 Please cite this article in press as: A. Chaudhuri, H. Boer, The impact of product-process complexity and new product development order winners on new product development performance: The mediating role of collaborative competence, J. Eng. Technol. Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jengtecman.2016.10.002 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Engineering and Technology Management