Strategy, structure and performance in product development: Observations from the auto industry☆

Abstract This article examines recent empirical research conducted or published on product development in the automobile industry with the objective of identifying what we have learned, and what we have yet to learn, about the effective management of this activity. The basic framework used to compare the studies examines variables related to product strategy, project structure or organizaton, and project as well as product performance. The evidence to date indicates that Japanese automobile producers have demonstrated the highest levels of productivity in development as well as of overall sales growth, and have used particular structures and processes to achieve this. The evidence does not clearly indicate what the precise relationships are between development productivity and quality or economic returns. We conclude that many other specific issues remain to be studied, and that, overall, researchers need to generate more precise conceptual models as well as empirical research that more tightly connect a company's competitive positioning and product strategy with its development-organization structure, management, and support technology, and then these variables with better performance measures.