A Study On Performance Of New Product Development Resulting From Innovation Strategy And Leadership Style

Scientific technology development for commercialization has become one of most important competencies of a firm in this era, twenty-one century. At the same time, life circle of technological products become very short mainly due to keen competition among suppliers in the market as well as rapid progress of technology application. Thus, innovation is so important that many nations and major business firms pay great attentions and put hard efforts in enhancing their unique capabilities.For business growth, company always needs new products and even new product lines efficiently and effectively responding to rapid changes in the market. Therefore, Innovation strategy based on strengthened R & D abilities is undoubtedly one of the major winning factors towards company success. Peter remarks that firms need the ability continuously to introduce new products to fit the market needs. It is one of basic conditions of business growth, and more importantly also the key competency to survive in the market.This research aims at fining out the role and importance of innovation in firms nowadays by starting with exploration of relationship between innovation strategy and leadership within firms, and further studies their interaction effects on new product development performance and company business final result. It analyzed 368 samples from technological companies in Taiwan to conclude the following findings:1. Innovation is widely recognized as very important and high-valued activity by business managers in Taiwan, and is greatly applied, and becomes substantial part in business growth strategy of individual companies.2. There is a positive relationship between innovation strategy and new product development performance. Firms that take proactive innovation strategy have higher performance than those of reactive strategy ones.3. Innovation strategy and leadership in firm also has significantly positive relation. Managers who take proactive innovation strategy are more likely inclined towards transformational leadership than those of reactive strategy ones.4. Leadership and performance of new product develop shows significant positive correlation. Performance under transformational type of leadership is significantly higher than that with leadership of transactional type and Laissez type.5. Innovation strategy type has no significant effects on performance of new product development. No matter manager takes proactive or reactive innovation strategy, transformational leadership results in good performance on new product development. On the other hand, no matter under transformational or transactional and Laissez leadership, firm that takes proactive innovation strategy has higher performance, while firm with reactive innovation strategy has lower performance on new product development.6. Firms that adopt highly the innovation strategy or under transformational leadership will result in good performance on new product development. This study also reveals the fact that firms tend to increase new product development performance by adopting both proper innovation strategy and suitable leadership type at the same time. Its overall result would be rare better than that solely emphasis on innovation strategy implementation or leadership adoption.7. This research also concludes that firms of higher performance on new product development usually have higher business operation revenue. This finding confirms commentary on many documents by scholars; success on new product development is beneficial to revenue growth. Finally, statistic of this research shows that firms of high performance on new product development have better overall profit result than those of lower performance.