Product news releases for time to market competitive intelligence

News releases are typically the primary and first source of corporately sanctioned information about a new product. The objective of this research is to discover if relationships exist among company sizes, the number of product news releases published and time to market as defined through news release information.; Eight hypotheses were tested using data from 53 products in the data communications industry. Included in this were 30 products from 27 private companies and 23 products from 13 public companies. The data was collected during the period of February 18, 1999 to September 27, 1999.; The results show that large companies publish fewer news releases than small companies. This is observed in both the period before and after the product becomes available.; In terms of Product Availability, large companies produce more costly products than small companies. For Customer Exposure, large companies find their first customer for new products faster than small companies. It is shown that the longer it takes to bring a product to market, the shorter the time required to find the first customer.; This research is the first empirical study on the relationships between company size, news releases and time to market. Unlike other time to market studies, this thesis expands the definition of time to market to include the time required to find the first customer. In addition, this research provides a repeatable process to collect time to market data without direct contact with organizations. This provides an “outside-in” view of the company providing data that is not subject to the opinions and attitudes of the employees of the corporation.