Strategic management of R&D and marketing integration for multi-dimensional success of new product developments: an empirical investigation in the Korean ICT industry

The purpose of this study is to show the impact of the R&D and marketing integration on newproduct development (NPD) success without any parametric assumptions on modelspecification. In the high-tech innovation management context, it has generally beenaccepted that tight integration between R&D and marketing successfully influences thedevelopment of an innovative product by stimulating a mutual understanding betweenpeople from different departments. However, a few researchers also pointed out that a tooclose relationship between R&D personnel and marketing personnel can cause importantinformation to be overlooked, thus reducing NPD success. Our research results, which arebased on empirical data and the application of the nonparametric regression methodMultivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, show an even more diverse effect of integratingR&D and marketing if different performance criteria are considered. Results demonstratethat the effect of integration between R&D and marketing is nonconstant and nonlinear, afinding that could not be captured with parametric assumptions. Therefore, our researchprovides an explanation for the opposing observations reported in earlier work.