How do new product development startups handle missing expertise?

How do new product development startups handle missing expertise?

Eris, O.
van den Eijnden, W.
Roling, M.

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovatie Management

2014-05-23

This paper presents a framework for how new product development focused startup firms (NPDSF) handle missing expertise. The dimensions of the framework are: strategies for handling missing expertise, channels used to acquire missing expertise, and a priori awareness, timing and nature of missing expertise. Each dimension was analyzed in the context of data collected through interviews with entrepreneurs at NPDSFs. Obtaining free advice from experts and attempting to develop the missing expertise internally were the most frequently used strategies. Product development team’s own social and professional network was the most frequently used channel. Moreover, the results suggest that if an NPDSF does not anticipate the missing expertise, it will most likely run into it unprepared during the development phase of the new product development process. On the other hand, if it anticipates the missing expertise, it will most likely handle it during the planning phase by making structural changes to its product vision and operations. Therefore, being able to anticipate missing expertise might increase NPDSF success. The framework that was developed in the study can be leveraged in guiding future research.

expertise
new product development
product design
startup
entrepreneurship

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:23e6f927-1173-40d0-831e-545c4af51a53

Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology

978-94-6186-177-1

Proceedings of the tenth international symposium on tools and methods of competitive engineering TMCE 2014, 1495-1508. (2014)

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) Eris, O.
van den Eijnden, W.
Roling, M.