Choosing the Right Partners: The Impact of Internal and External Integration on Innovation Performance

Collaboration with internal and external partners has been lauded as having a positive impact on the new product development (NPD) process (Atuahene-Gima 2003). However, given that incremental and radical innovations have different development trajectories (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995), it is possible that the impact of integration on the NPD process differs across these two innovation types (Tatikonda and Montoya-Weiss 2001). Therefore, this study asks: How should organizations integrate internal and external NPD team members when developing radical innovations versus incremental innovations? Given that new product teams form the nucleus of an organization’s NPD efforts (Leenders et al. 2007), understanding the effects of team integration on new product processes and outcomes is crucial for new product success.