Supplier collaboration and new product performance: a contingency model

The purpose of this paper is to present a contingency model to examine how technological capacity, promotion capacity, and technological substitution affect the supplier collaboration‐new product performance relationship.

This study uses data from a Government survey of technological innovation. A total of 201 machinery/electronics equipment manufacturing firms in Taiwan comprise the sample. A Tobit regression analysis is adopted to analyze the data.

It is found that technological capacity and promotion capacity enhance the effect of supplier collaboration on new product performance. Technological substitution mitigates the relationship between supplier collaboration and new product performance.

The sample of this study just focuses on machinery/electronics equipment manufacturing firms. The new insights of this study imply that by failing to consider the contingency roles of technological capacity, promotion capacity, and technological substitution, previous research may have assumed away the conditions external and internal to a firm and thus may have reached an oversimplified view of the link between supplier collaboration and product innovation performance.

Firms can improve the effect of supplier collaboration on product innovation by enhancing their technological capacity and promotion capacity.

The paper makes contributions to explain why some firms attain better new product performance than others under the same level of supplier collaboration.