Toward New Product and Process Development Networks: The Case of the German Car Industry

Most German auto manufacturers were late in reorganizing their new product creation (NPC) systems. It is true that they began with wide-ranging programmatic considerations about reorganizing, and actually implanted individual measures at around the same time as their American counterparts at the end of the 1980s. However, German manufacturers held back with their changes until the mid-1990s, apart from BMW, which had already taken into service a center for integrated technical development and rearranged its NPC system back in 1990.