What is the place of technical and scientific service companies (TSS) in the process of developing new products? Insights on their managerial and organizational features

Abstract

The new product development (NPD) process is composed by several phases, from concept to final production rump-up, and for each phase, it is now widely recognized that innovators can find external supporting services as design, prototyping, engineering, etc. Companies offering these technical and scientific services (TSS) are in fact more and more diffused. Literature has conducted some explorative attempts to study more in depth how these service companies are organized and managed by assuming a sort of internal perspective and analyzing the main companies’ choices in terms of business model elements. In a similar vein, we deeply study the organizational and managerial features for a sample of technical service Italian companies. The empirical study has been conducted by a twofold aim: (i) to search for TSS companies that support the entire process of new product development and/or, conversely, that provide services to a smaller part of the innovation process or only on few stages in order to identify clusters of companies; (ii) once identified clusters, to study if they show differences in terms of some organisational and managerial features. The analysis of the gathered data has actually allowed to identify some typical profiles of TSS companies in which the elements of the business model take a particular and coherent combination.

Keywords: new product development, TSS, outsourcing, Italy, multiple case-studies

International Journal of Engineering, Science and Technology, Vol. 2, No. 9, 2010, pp. 39-53