Impact of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Orientations on New Product Development
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Date
2013
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Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
In current business scenario, success of the business does not only rely upon the profit of the
organization. It depends on how much the company is capable for capturing the need of the
customer. For catering to the need of the customer is directly dealing with providing new
products which have the capability of providing benefits to the end users. It is an inter-linked
sequence of information processing tasks where knowledge of customer needs is translated into
final product design (Meybodi, 2003). New product development is one of the most powerful
but difficult activities in business (Clark and Wheelwright, 1995).The new product development
also can be identified as a key indicator of the success of the business organization. Therefore,
each and every business firm should have to concentrate highly on the new product
development process as it becomes a strategic weapon of the success of the organization.
Business managers and marketing academics alike agree that an essential element of an
organization’s long-term survival is success in new product development. Therefore, scholars
have devoted their required attention to identify the factors affecting new product development
and to bring out several factors in their several investigations.
Furthermore, it is widely known that strategic orientation is important as one of determinants to
improve company performance. Several studies have been conducted to find the relationship
between strategic orientation and the firm performance. However, very little of study consider
this factor as one of the contributing factors in improving new product development process.
Entrepreneurial orientation is defined as a firm’s processes, practices and decision-making
activities, by which the firm embarks on proactive and aggressive initiatives to alter the
competitive scene to its advantage (Atuahene-Gima and Ko, 2001; Zhou et al., 2005). It is clear
that entrepreneurial firms are engaging the continuous innovation of new product. As proposed
by Lumpkin and Dess (1996), firms adhering to an entrepreneurial orientation focus on grasping
new market opportunities and proactively competing with their rivals, thus undertaking greater
risks. Entrepreneurial orientation can be considered as one of driving factors in new product
development.
Thus this research has to be conducted to find out the effect of strategic orientation and
entrepreneurial orientation on new product development in food and beverage sector in Western
province. The relationship between strategic orientation and entrepreneurial orientation on new
product development will be identified.
Methodology
For the purpose of this study, the listed food and beverage companies have been selected as the
population out of twenty listed companies’, tobacco sector has been disregarded because of
limitation to collect data. Except tobacco sector, all other nineteen (19) companies have been
selected for the data collection process.
Set of questionnaires and telephone conversations have been utilized as the data collection
methods. In order to have a better understanding the data have been collected from marketing
managers, operation managers and those who have been involving greatly in new product
development process. Questionnaires have consisted with five point Likert scale, open ended
and close ended questions and it has designed as self-administered questionnaire.
Customer orientation, competitor orientation, technological orientation and inter-functional
coordination have been selected as the strategic orientation dimensions and innovativeness, pro-
activeness and risk taking were the entrepreneurial orientation dimensions. Hypothesizes have
been built in order to achieve the established objectives as well. Data analyzing has been done
in order to achieve the research objectives and Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 16)
and Microsoft Office Excel (MS Excel) packages have been used to analyze and interpret the
research findings.
Description
Keywords
Management, Entrepreneurship and management, Human Resource Management, Entrepreneurial Orientations, Economics, Business Management