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Video games have had a greater impact on our society than almost any other leisure activity. They not only consume a large portion of our free time, they influence cultural trends, drive microprocessor development, and help train pilots and soldiers. Now, with the Nintendo Wii and DS, they are helping people stay fit, facilitating rehabilitation, and creating new learning opportunities. Innovation has played a major role in the long term success of the video game industry, as software developers and hardware engineers attempt to design products that meet the needs of ever widening segments of the population. At the same time, companies with the most advanced products are often proving to be less successful than their competitors. Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry identifies patterns that will help engineers, developers, and marketing executives to formulate better business strategies and successfully bring new products to market. Readers will also discover how some video game companies are challenging normal industry rules by using radical innovations to attract new customers. Finally, this revealing book sheds light on why some innovations have attracted legions of followers among populations that have never before been viewed as gamers, including parents and senior citizens and how video games have come to be used in a variety of socially beneficial ways. David Wesley and Gloria Barczak's comparison of product features, marketing strategies, and the supply chain will appeal to marketing professionals, business managers, and product design engineers in technology intensive industries, to government officials who are under increasing pressure to understand and regulate video games, and to anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of one of the most important industries to emerge in modern times. In addition, as video games become an ever more pervasive aspect of media entertainment, managers from companies of all stripes need to understand video gaming as a way to reach potential customers. David Wesley is a Research Manager at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration in Boston. His award-winning case studies on companies like Adidas, Hewlett-Packard, and Nintendo have appeared in numerous management textbooks and have been consistently ranked among the best-selling cases at Harvard Business School Publishing and Ivey Publishing. Mr. Wesley has an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria. Professor Gloria Barczak is Professor and Chair of the marketing department at Northeastern University and former director of the Executive MBA program. She has published over 25 articles and several book chapters in the area of innovation and new product development and was recently recognized as one of the top innovation management scholars in the world by the Journal of Product Innovation Management and has been awarded the Robert D. Klein University Lecturer for 2009-2010 award by Northeastern University. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Creativity and Innovation Management.

Peer reviewed academic journals, like AMS Review, live and die by their ability to obtain high quality reviews of submitted manuscripts. However, academics are increasingly pressed for time, needing to publish their research, teach their classes, and provide service to their Department, Faculty/College and University to support their careers in terms of retention, tenure, and promotion. Amidst these responsibilities, as a service to the Academy, academics also are expected to provide reviews of manuscripts in order to move the intellectual trajectory of the domain forward. High quality reviewing, though, takes cognitive energy and is time consuming, which then interferes with other academic responsibilities. For these reasons, editors of peer-reviewed academic journals are finding it more and more difficult to obtain a sufficient number of high-quality reviews to make good decisions about submissions in a timely manner. The purpose of this article is to help all reviewers, but especially those reviewing conceptual articles, provide a high-quality review. Specifically, this article first defines what constitutes a “high quality review,” and suggests how reviewing can aid an academic’s own research, writing and career. It then defines the behaviors needed for effective reviewing for all manuscripts, termed the 5 R’s: roles, responsibilities, responses, reactions, and respect. It then provides a reviewing template for conceptual articles, given the special difficulties of peer reviewing such articles, and closes with a few additional pieces of advice to help with being efficient in reviewing, while being effective.

Information technology (IT) is the cornerstone of the modern new product development (NPD) process. A new generation of communication and collaboration tools has propagated into nearly all aspects of NPD. To better understand how these collaborative tools, such as wikis, cloud-based file sharing, social networking, blogs, and microblogging platforms like Twitter, are being used in NPD and what influence they have on NPD outcomes, we undertook a global study of collaborative IT tool use in 443 firms. We found that the usage frequency of these collaborative tools is currently low, but it is positively correlated with project performance. Our results also show that the best-performing projects use all of these tools more intensively than poorer-performing projects. In addition, the usage frequency of these tools differentiated the best from the rest in smaller and medium-sized firms but not in larger firms. Our findings suggest that NPD managers should encourage the use of new forms of communication and collaboration and should embolden and empower the migration toward these collaborative tools. Author Tucker J. Marion will host an IRI-sponsored webinar on this subject on April 1, 2016 at 12 pm EDT. Register to attend at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6567583436205158658.

Information technology (IT) is the cornerstone of the modern new product development (NPD) process. A new generation of communication and collaboration tools has propagated into nearly all aspects of NPD. To better understand how these collaborative tools, such as wikis, cloud-based file sharing, social networking, blogs, and microblogging platforms like Twitter, are being used in NPD and what influence they have on NPD outcomes, we undertook a global study of collaborative IT tool use in 443 firms. We found that the usage frequency of these collaborative tools is currently low, but it is positively correlated with project performance. Our results also show that the best-performing projects use all of these tools more intensively than poorer-performing projects. In addition, the usage frequency of these tools differentiated the best from the rest in smaller and medium-sized firms but not in larger firms. Our findings suggest that NPD managers should encourage the use of new forms of communication and collaboration and should embolden and empower the migration toward these collaborative tools. Author Tucker J. Marion will host an IRI-sponsored webinar on this subject on April 1, 2016 at 12 pm EDT. Register to attend at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6567583436205158658 .

In today's global environment, new product development often requires the collaboration of cross-functional team members living and working in different countries. Dissimilar languages, cultures and time zones provide added complexity to the already difficult task of managing teams with different functional perspectives and backgrounds. Ten years of research on leading and managing global, as well as traditional, NPD teams has surfaced four key challenges facing global team leaders: team members who speak different native languages, who come from different cultural backgrounds, who live and work in multiple countries, and who come from different companies. For each challenge, there are skills and attributes that global team leaders need to possess as well as actions they need to take to ensure the success of their global teams.

The increasing use of cross-functional teams for new product development (NPD) belies the difficulty managers face in creating teams that are truly effective. Effectiveness depends, in part, on having members who are satisfied with their team and their project. This article reports the results of 71 interviews with members of NPD teams, with a particular focus on the drivers of team member satisfaction. These drivers include: team characteristics, clear project goals, clarity about evaluation and rewards, effective leadership, management support, and manageable levels of conflict and stress. To create satisfied team members, we discuss actions that can be taken at the senior management, project leader and team member level.

Considers how research carried out during trade shows can help industrial firms to manage the new product development process. Discusses the NPD process and offers a scheme for classifying trade fairs, thus making the selection of appropriate events easier for the industrial marketer. Develops recommendations for the conducting of new product research at trade shows and concludes that while not a substitute for traditional NPD research methods due to cost limitations and the different types of attendees present at various events, good opportunities exist for industrial exhibitors to use NPD stages such as idea generation, screening and testing at trade shows rather than concentrating on the commercialization of new products.

Examines how marketing research affects cycle time (the time from product conceptualization to product introduction), in technology-driven industries. The key research question to be examined in this study is: how do the collection, dissemination and utilization of marketing research information affect cycle time? Focuses on the telecommunications industry as an industry in which technology often drives the dynamics in the marketplace. Presents an empirical examination of the key research question in an exploratory study of hardware firms in the telecommunications industry. The results suggest that the collection of marketing research does not impact cycle time significantly. However, increased frequency of dissemination of the information collected via marketing research can increase cycle time. Finds also that, while the utilization ofmarketing research in designing products can increase cycle time, utilization of marketing research for strategy development can actually reduce cycle time. Thus, incorporation of marketing research in new product development can aid the introduction of new products in a timely manner.

More and more firms face the need to access a critical resource for new product development (NPD) - people who are dispersed around the world. Like other types of product development teams, global teams experience the challenge of getting a diverse group of individuals from different functional areas to work together effectively for a finite period of time to accomplish specific project objectives. In light of the critical role that global teams play in NPD, it is surprising that our understanding of how to manage them effectively has not kept pace with their increasing use. A study was conducted that sought to understand why companies use global teams, the challenges that managers and project leaders face in leading global teams, and the practices that they use to do so successfully. It was found that there are 4 principal reasons for using global teams: 1. to address global markets by identifying common product platforms, 2. to identify unique needs of local markets, 3. to capitalize on globally distributed Centers of Excellence, and 4. to bring together dispersed resources.