Network Insights for Partner Selection in Inter-Organisational New Product Development Projects

Selecting partners for new product development (NPD) is an important yet under-supported task. Thispaper focuses on decision-making support for the NPD collaboration stages of partner exploration andsearch. We provide a conceptual framework for a network-based platform to identify potential researchandinnovation partners.

The framework integrates prior research on factors determining successful NPDcollaborations and makes the factors actionable by connecting them to what is often publicly availabledata.Four categories of success factors for collaborations are included in the framework: technologicalcloseness, relational closeness, geographical closeness and a set of organisational variables.

In order toidentify a subset of new product development partners and aid the selection process, three characteristicsof NPD projects are considered as mediators of those success factors: the desired degree ofinnovativeness of the NPD project, the initial technological maturity of the NPD project, and thecombination of time and budget constraints.

The proposed framework describes each of these factors,their mediators, and the interplay between them.Using the conceptual framework as a guide, we also propose and illustrate with examples the networkbasedplatform to explore NPD partners. The developed framework and platform are part of Net-Sights,an ongoing research project to develop open-source decision-support tools for network insights.

Thefirst version of this tool will soon be available as an online platform to support inter-organisational andcollaborative sustainable production projects in Denmark.