The PDMA Handbook of Innovation and New Product Development, 4th Edition

CHAPTER FOURTEEN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN EAST ASIA: BEST PRACTICES AND LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

Martin Hemmert

14.1 Introduction

While modern new product development (NPD) systems and practices first evolved in Western countries, since the 1980s, the NPD performance of East Asian companies has often exceeded that of their Western rivals in major industries. This strong performance has been enabled by organizing NPD in ways that are different from the West. Japanese automobile manufacturers have shown far superior NPD performance over their American and European competitors in terms of lead time, quality, and productivity (Clark and Fujimoto 1991). Similarly, Japanese electronics firms achieved NPD excellence based on organizational processes focused on organizational knowledge creation and knowledge transfer, which fundamentally differ from those in Western firms (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). NPD tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) and total quality management (TQM) have been intensively discussed globally (Chan and Wu 2002; Hackman and Wageman 1995) since they have been implemented widely in Japan, and Japanese companies have continuously applied these and other NPD practices effectively. Western companies have attempted to learn from their Japanese rivals in a variety of ways.

More recently, competitors from other East Asian countries, most notably South Korea (hereafter, ...