Dr. P. (Pinar) Cankurtaran

The past three decades have seen many companies adopting time-based strategies in an effort to bring their products to market quickly. While this trend in the industry has given rise to extensive scholarly interest in product development speed, extant literature has yet to provide a coherent account of its consequences for new product development performance, its drivers, and the conditions under which these drivers are beneficial. Motivated by the clear need for more work the area, this dissertation seeks to expand scholarly knowledge on NPD speed by examining (1) the effect of speed on performance given the inconsistencies in the empirical findings; and (2) how product development can effectively be accelerated, taking into account uncertainty as a contingency factor. This dissertation consists of three studies, each of which approaches the subject matter from a different angle and investigates it in different theoretical domains. Study 1 focuses on the consequences of development speed, and uses meta analytic methods to shed light into how development speed relates to new product success, taking into account its different dimensions. Studies 2 and 3 direct the attention to the antecedents of development speed, also taking into account the moderating role of uncertainty. While study 2 treats acceleration as a continuous process that is a by-product of the firm’s prior NPD experience, study 3 views acceleration as achievable primarily by active management intervention in the form of acceleration strategies. Collectively, the three studies offer a comprehensive account of product development speed and its successful management.