Contextual factors for suppier and customer integration on product performance

The beneficial impacts of supplier and customer integration are widely acknowledged in new product development. Despite this, prior empirical studies have not adequately addressed what integration processes lead an organization to achieve better product performance, nor which contextual factors for such integration are. This paper examines the impact of environmental (i.e. market certainty) and internal (i.e. internally integrated product development) factors on key supplier and customer integration processes (i.e. information sharing and product co-development with supplier and customer respectively) and in turn testifies the impact of them on product innovativeness and product performance.