A Cross-team Framework of International Knowledge Acquisition on New Product Development Capabilities and New Product Market Performance

Rapid new product developments (NPDs) have drastically changed the competitive landscape in the global economy. Because the time-to-market dimension of product introduction has become a crucial determinant of multinational corporations' (MNCs') competitive advantage, the ability of MNCs to exploit their knowledge globally across subsidiaries using cross-teams has become an important source of competitive advantage. Recognizing the crucial role of MNCs' knowledge management in NPD, the authors develop a conceptual framework to investigate the antecedents and outcomes of international knowledge acquisition at the cross-team level. The framework suggests that though it is important to acquire necessary knowledge resources for NPD, managers must nurture an NPD project team's realized absorptive capacity to transform the acquired knowledge resources into NPD capabilities, which in turn affect new product market performance.