Mission Impossible: How to Make Early Supplier Involvement Work in New Product Development?

Innovation is paramount to survive in today’s rapidly changing world. Developing and marketing new technologies, solutions and products successfully requires the concerted actions of many stakeholders in global value chains. Large companies have embraced the idea of open innovation. They realize that in order to speed up development and reduce risk, they need to collaborate with supply and knowledge partners. However, mobilizing partner specialist knowledge seems problematic. Academic research demonstrates contrasting results. In some cases, supplier collaboration in new product development i.e. early supplier involvement may create large benefits. In other cases, it may lead to detrimental and even devastating results. This chapter discusses why these contrasting results are found. It draws on over 30 years of academic research, that was conducted and/or supervised by the author. The chapter concludes that, as the drivers and enablers of early supplier involvement today are clear, fostering effective human interaction aimed at sensitive knowledge and information exchange on behalf of organizations with conflicting interests is crucial in early supplier involvement. As the human factor in technology driven organizations is often undervalued, more research is needed to understand how to mobilize interorganizational knowledge sharing in such exchanges.