Correlation between New Product Development and Interdepartmental Integration
Syed Rashid Hussain Shah

Abstract
New product development is critical for the survival of many firms in an ever increasingly competitive market place. Companies expend a great deal of their resources, financial and human in the pursuit of the competitive advantage that can be gained from the successful development of new products and thus avoiding crippling price competition. Unfortunately the NPD process still remains problematic for many firms, why do so many new products fail? Much of the literature in this area points the “finger of blame” squarely in the direction of the low levels of integration between the firms marketing and other functions. Does the degree of integration of functionally specialised activities impact on new product success rates? Empirical evidence suggests a positive relationship exists between the level of integration and successful new product outcomes [1, 2, 54].

The most widely accepted methods to achieve integration between functions are discussed in this paper. These methods also show how to overcome the integration barriers, which confront mostly during NPD. In this paper, a conceptual framework is derived which consists of five integrating facilitator, which help to achieve integration between marketing and other functions during NPD in the organization. Adopting these facilitators will increase the certainty to achieve integration through more collaborative work between departments. As a consequence of this collaborative work between departments, the company will increase the level of integration between marketing and other functions. Furthermore, the characteristics of highly collaborative firms are presented. On the basis of these characteristics a practical implementation and certain recommendations for the companies are presented in the end.

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