The impacts of speed-to-market on new product success: the moderating effects of uncertainty

Time-based strategy is becoming an important weapon to achieve competitive advantage in the current environment of fast-changing technology and customer requirements. Speed-to-market has become the mantra of both researchers and practitioners in new product development (NPD), but there are limited and conflicting findings on the relationship between speed-to-market and product success. A more important question is whether faster is always better. In a study of 692 NPD projects, we examined the relationship between speed-to-market and new product success (NPS) under different conditions of uncertainty. Our results indicate that speed-to-market is generally positively associated with overall NPS, but market uncertainty moderates the direct effect. Speed-to-market is less important to NPS under conditions of low market uncertainty. Our results also suggest that technological uncertainty does not affect the speed–success relationship. The implication is that it is more important to execute a time-based strategy in an unfamiliar, emerging, or fast-changing market than in a familiar, existing, and stable market. The limitations and future research related to these results are discussed.