Validating and Reflecting on Market Information Processing in Really New Product Development: When to Use What Outbound Team Strategy

New product development (NPD) teams enhance their change of success when they process rich and diverse market information. However, processing market information in really new NPD is subject to high levels of uncertainty and often conducted under high levels of teamautonomy. Prior research focused on intra-team factors, such as cross-functional integration, affecting market information processing in really new NPD and largely overlooked the role of crossing team boundaries and reaching out to the wider organization in which NPD teams are embedded (i.e. outbound strategies). Since management research shows that teams may differ in their outbound strategies and that these influence team performance, this is surprising, and therefore presents a significant gap in our knowledge on market-oriented NPD. Against this backdrop we present a detailed comparative longitudinal case-study of two new product trajectories, Shield and Anti-resist, in one chemical firm, ChemCo. Based on indepth-interviews and archival data we explore how and when reaching out to other parts of the organization plays a role in market information processing in really new NPD. We find that project members in Anti-resist processed a larger variety of market information when compared to the ones in Shield, especially in the early phases of the project. In due course this led to the Anti-resist team being able to introduce the product into the market while Shield was put on hold. Case findings suggests that lack of market information processing in Shield was rooted in differences in outbound strategies between the two projects and was not due to intra-team factors. Project members in Shield, in comparison to the ones in Anti-resist, were less reflective on their own market information processing by reaching out to other parts of ChemCo, such as a general NPD protocol, senior management, and other marketing/sales groups. While the literature has praised decentralization for enhancing information processing and creativity, we conclude that this comes with the responsibility of individual NPD teams to proactively reflect on their own marketing actions along the way in really new NPD. This implies that managers better recognize team behavior and adapt their control mechanisms to incorporate outbound team strategies.