The Role of Information Technology in Product Development: An Introduction - Information Technology and Product Development - page 2

inquiry and call for contributions from most business functional areas. Indeed, the
field of product development (PD) has been defined as including the set of activities
“beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and ending in the produc-
tion, sales, and delivery of a product” (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2000, p. 2). Compared
to other management areas such as marketing, operations, and strategy, the field
of information technology (IT) has been a relatively late entrant in the domain of
product and service innovation.
From the mid-1990s, the rapid infusion of information and communication tech-
nologies in product development has significantly enhanced the importance of IT
for product development managers and practitioners. IT-enabled product develop-
ment now has the potential to radically redefine the processes and outcomes of new
product development (NPD). However, as is evident from the extant research on
IT management, effective deployment of IT resources for product development will
call for careful consideration of the complex interplay between IT applications and
the product development context (Nambisan, 2003). Managers need to understand
how IT shapes the NPD processes and their outcomes, the development and man-
agement of the product development team (including the norms, values, and the
relational ties), the knowledge flows and the knowledge acquisition/creation strate-
gies, the project management models, and the linkages of product development (PD)
with other organizational functions/objectives.
The primary purpose of this topic is to contribute toward such an understand-
ing by serving as a platform for researchers from varied disciplines to develop
new theoretical concepts and insights on the application of IT in product and ser-
vice innovation activities. Specifically, the different chapters in this topic draw on
theoretical concepts and issues from varied management areas including informa-
tion systems, technology management, marketing, operations, business strategy, and
organizational behavior to redefine and discuss the role of IT in product and service
development and the organizational and management issues that underlie the suc-
cessful deployment of IT in innovation contexts. Overall, the topic is intended to
provide a foundation for future research on the diverse types of IT applications
in product development and their potential impact on both product and service
innovation.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I examine the motivation for this
topic in greater detail and then describe the organization of the topic.
1.2 The Evolution of Product and Service
Development Research
The interdisciplinary field of product development has evolved gradually over the
last 30 years or so, bringing different reference disciplines into focus at different
points in time. The roots of the PD field can be traced to the R&D and engineering
management literatures of the 1960s and the early 1970s. These two fields gave early
PD research a project- and innovation-management orientation (Rothwell, Freeman,