| This study is motivated by observing a gap between (1) the increasing industry needs of more guidance on inter-firm collaborative product development (CPD), and (2) the insufficient academic research status. In order to address this gap and provide better understanding of the mechanism of CPD, two research questions were asked: (1) What are the key drivers of CPD project performance, how they interact with each other and affect CPD performance? (2) How do the manufacturer-supplier collaboration and manufacturer-customer collaboration affect the speed of the different stages of product development? To address the first research question, the relevant literature from different business disciplines are reviewed. Four critical CPD performance drivers from the literature of different business disciplines are identified. Twenty archival cases served as the sample for this study. The information in the cases are coded and analyzed by using a formalized multiple case study method, Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Combining the analysis findings with rich information from the cases, an integrative framework for CPD is proposed. To address the second research question, the relationship between manufacturer-supplier collaboration and manufacturer-customer collaboration, as well as how these collaborations affect the speed of different CPD stages is studied. This study reflects an effort to extend current literature on CPD from the individual dyadic level to a supply chain level. The refutable hypotheses are empirically tested using the data of sixty-two projects. The regression analysis results show that intensive manufacturer-supplier collaboration reduces the number of major design changes in the later design stages, while customer-manufacturer collaboration in earlier design stages can significantly reduces unnecessary design efforts in the design process. In the final chapter, the theoretical contributions, industry implications, limitations, and future research are discussed. |
