"Knowledge Utilization, Development Speed, and Discontinue Speed for New Product Initiatives"

This study investigates the relationship between knowledge access and utilization strategies and the time involved in new product development (NPD). Using data from the pharmaceutical industry from the period 1994 – 2006, the study focuses on two NPD project endpoints. Time-to-market is the length of time an NPD project is in development before the first drug is launched from it. Time-to-discontinue is the time in development before a project is ended without any drug launching from the initiative. Operationalizations of knowledge strategies used as independent variables are the collaboration with partners, the depth of activity in a product knowledge category, and the number of knowledge categories. Viewing depth in a knowledge category as an exploitation measure and the number of different categories as an exploration measure, the analysis considers a firm’s ambidexterity at the project-level. The interaction of exploitation and exploration is associated with shorter time-to-market and longer time-to-di...