Managing Conflict and Collaboration in New Product Development

While involving parties with varying preferences, interests and knowledge brings new types of know-how outside the firm's existing knowledge boundaries, thus facilitating diversity and the “search" for high-value solutions in the technology landscape, it makes it more difficult to coordinate the parties' actions in a congruent manner. The central theme of this book is therefore the management of collaboration and conflicts between professional organizations in the context of New Product Development (NPD). This book particularly investigates several theoretical and empirical research questions relevant to managing collaboration and conflict both at the firm and at the project level. At the firm level, it studies why a firm should outsource (motivation), with whom to work (selection), and how to implement the collaboration (process and contracting). At the project level, it searches for the operational principles which lead to effective NPD execution in cross-organization collaborative projects. In addition, it applies a model to examine the organizational (signaling), financial (bonus) and behavioral (status) levers to coordinate internal parties in a cross-functional project.