Collaboration practices, strategic capabilities and performance in Japanese and American product development: Do they differ?

Do New Product Development (NPD) collaboration practices differ across national subsets and, if so, does this make a difference to overall NPD performance? To address these questions, we studied the NPD programs of both Japanese and American firms and explored whether there are differences between the use of internal and external collaboration and strategic innovation practices. We further examined whether this had any significant effects on overall program performance. We found that the American firms we surveyed used collaboration practices significantly more often than the Japanese firms. However, when taking all factors into consideration, only strategic innovation capabilities were significantly linked with both overall performance and nationality. Thus, the use of collaboration without developing innovation capabilities is not enough for performance effects.