• Management support; they had management support (an important indicator of successful projects).

• New product development process proficiency; they had a more proficient process execution than unsuccessful teams.

• Team processes; they demonstrated a high teamwork atmosphere and exhibited team stability/team experience during projects.

• Documentation systems; they made more effective use of information processing via their documentation systems.

• Communication; the team members enjoyed better formal communications.

• Established project deadlines; they had aggressive launch dates with each being completed on a tight schedule. (Akgün et al, 2004)

Innovation strategy issues

Research into 650 leading worldwide manufacturers conducted by Deloitte was released in 2004 and reported that a reluctance to allocate additional spending on R&D was one of the major factors faced by manufacturers in profitably bringing new products and services to market. This was highlighted along with the lack of priority placed on successful innovation practices. Paradoxically most respondents viewed supporting product innovation as one of the least important priorities and only a small percentage excelled in three critical areas relating to innovation - managing innovation, exploiting innovation, and building innovation capabilities. Other issues identified by respondents were:

• Managing innovation required, among other attributes, the ability to identify both `sustaining` and `disruptive` innovations;

• Most companies focused only on the front end of the new product life cycle instead of on the entire life cycle;

• Building innovation capabilities required concentration on four areas:
• Extensive collaboration with customers and suppliers, and the development of better processes to increase flexibility and lower cost;
• Creating superior visibility both upstream and downstream in the value chain;
• Having flexibility with product development, manufacturing, and other operations;
• Using advanced technologies for product life cycle management, customer relationship management, and advanced planning and scheduling.

• Respondents expected new product revenue to jump to 35% of revenues in 2006, up from just 21% in 1998;

• Respondents expected that products representing over 70% of today’s sales will be obsolete by 2010 due to changing customer demands and competitive offerings. (Colman, 2004)

New product design strategies among manufacturers

Respondents to a 2005 Forrester Research survey of US manufacturing firms concerning innovative practices reported that they:

• Were developing more innovative programmes (66%);

• Were very successful in meeting innovation performance goals (7%);

• Expected to increase innovation budgets over the next 3 years (7%);

• Had R&D pipelines which were dominated by “disruptive innovation” projects (30%);

• Relied heavily on outsourced innovation (22%),

• Covered R&D expenses by licensing inventions to others (5%);

• Had an innovation processes which responded flexibly to changes in customer requirements (16%);

• Expressed concern about improving time-to-market their innovations (67%); and

• Had customers who provided the main catalyst for innovation (45%).

Interestingly most firms did not use customer-focused metrics to measure the quality/success of innovations, choosing rather to use financial metrics e.g., revenues, profits, and market share. (Radjou, 2005) 

Dynamic innovation most common description of innovation

Results from a survey of US firms concerning the state of innovation showed that: