Critical factors for new product developments in SMEs virtual team

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are considered as an engine for economic growth all over the world and
especially for developing countries. During the past decade, new product development (NPD) has increasingly been
recognized as a critical factor in ensuring the continued survival of SMEs. On the other hand, the rapid rate of
market and technological changes has accelerated in the past decade, so this turbulent environment requires new
methods and techniques to bring successful new products to the marketplace. Virtual team can be a solution to
answer the requested demand. However, literature have shown no significant differences between traditional NPD
and virtual NPD in general, whereas NPD in SME’s virtual team has not been systematically investigated in
developing countries. This paper aims to bridge this gap by first reviewing the NPD and its relationship with
virtuality and then identifies the critical factors of NPD in virtual teams. The statistical method was utilized to
perform the required analysis of data from the survey. The results were achieved through factor analysis at the
perspective of NPD in some Malaysian and Iranian manufacturing firms (N = 191). The 20 new product development
factors were grouped into five higher level constructs. It gives valuable insight and guidelines, which hopefully will
help managers of firms in developing countries to consider the main factors in NPD