Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

278 C. Nakata and S. Im
Measures
We followed recommendations by Churchill (1979) to develop and validate the
measures for major constructs. Multiple-item measures, with 5-point Likert-type
scales (1 for “strongly disagree” to 5 for “strongly agree”), were collected from
the literature and used to assess the major constructs. After data collection, we
subjected the items to a purification process, keeping those that exhibited desirable
psychometric properties. Final measures for each country showed acceptable internal
consistency based on coefficient alphas of .70 or higher (see Appendix 1 for
the scales and reliability levels).
Cross-functional Integration (CFI). We adopted Song and Xie’s definition of
cross-functional integration: “effective unity of effort by R&D, manufacturing,
and marketing in new product development” (2000, p.64). For this construct, we
used a three-item measure adapted from Song and Parry (1997a) that examines the
overall goodness of integration and communications among R&D, marketing, and
manufacturing.
New Product Team Proficiency (NPTP). This is a new construct referring to the
abilities, skills, knowledge, and efficacy of a new product team in carrying out innovation
activities. Based on the interviews as well as extant research on new
product teams, we created a five-item measure encompassing dimensions such as
technical skills, marketing knowledge, and team efficiency in the group responsible
for developing a new product.
Initiation Process (IP). Following Zaltman, Duncan, and Holbek (1973), we define
initiation process as the conceptual and pre-developmental tasks in new product
development, including idea generation, concept evaluation, market research,
screening, and prototype testing. We incorporated six items for initiation tasks
from studies by Song and Parry (1997a) and Cooper (1979).
New Product Advantage (NPA). This construct refers to “a product’s perceived
superiority relative to competitive products” (Song and Montoya-Weiss 2001, p.
65). In keeping with this rather encompassing definition, we combined several
measures of advantage current in the literature (Song and Parry 1997a; Song and
Parry 1999; Song and Montoya-Weiss 2001;, Song and Parry 1997b). Our eightitem
measure of new product advantage focuses on the new product’s uniqueness,
need fulfillment, utility, quality, benefits, problem-solving capability, innovativeness,
and radical difference relative to competitive offerings.
New Product Performance (NPP). As recommended by new product strategy researchers
(Song and Parry 1997a; Montoya-Weiss and Calantone 1994; Song and
Parry 1997b; Churchill 1979), we incorporated multiple dimensions for this construct.
A five-item measure was adapted from Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1995)
and Song and Parry (1997a) to assess NPP in terms of relative market share, relative
sales, and relative profitability of all new products in the last 12 months. The
items represented the most critical and often used NPP measures, termed “core
success/failure measures”: customer acceptance (e.g. meeting sales goals), financial
performance (e.g. profitability), and firm-level measures (e.g. firm sales volume)
(Griffin and Page 1993).