Accelerating time-to-market in global partnership environment

Summary form only given. Improving competitive advantage in new product development (NPD) requires simultaneously achieving three critical goals: quality excellence, competitive cost, and reduced time-to-market. Sixteen NPD conditions, called "accelerators", have proven effective for single company, single-culture co-located project team environment. Extending results to a multi-country, partnership, globally distributed project team environment requires understanding the key cultural factors and their influence on the accelerators. Adjustments for these cultural factors are required depending on how their positive or negative influence on the Accelerators. An award winning product developed by a US/Japanese team from two partner companies illustrates key points. The paper first reviews the sixteen accelerators, or NPD conditions that have proven effective for reducing the time-to-market for NPD projects in single-company single-culture co-located project team environments. Next, eleven key cultural factors are identified that may affect the product development project either positively or negatively, given the US/Japanese, globally distributed, joint company partnership environment. These eleven key cultural factors are categorized into four supporting cultural actors, three detracting cultural act, and four fixed cultural factors depending on their corresponding influence on the accelerators.