Abstract
The paper discusses the results of an empirical research about the management and organisation of firms offering new product development services. A wide literature has discussed about their rising importance as actors in the open innovation field; it arises in reason of the highly competitive market which pushes enterprises in a "continuous innovation" condition. In order to create and to maintain their competitive advantage, these firms have increased pressure on time, costs and effectiveness of their new product development process searching for an optimization of such activities. In an open innovation context, this involves also collaborations outside the boundaries of the firm. So it is possible to observe the growing tendency to outsource, among activities related to research & development, those tied to the new product development (as marketing, feasibility study, industrial design, mechanical design, electronic design, engineering, rapid prototyping, pre-production and testing), creating new business opportunities. In fact, this has carried to the birth and spread of enterprises that perform technical-scientific services and in particular those which are associated with the development of a new product. The aim of this paper is to give a brief while complete picture of these kinds of firms, completing existing literature with actual data and information, and referring mainly to the Italian Landscape. The information to such study have been found through seventeen case studies of Italian new product development (NPD) companies, able to support the entire new product development process of their clients. The analysis of the gathered data has allowed the characterization of the enterprises and the appraisal of the correlations between managerial variables (the range of the services offers, price, number and duration of the projects, organizational structure, and managerial model). Moreover this allows to define some peculiarities of NPD enterprises the elements that increase business performance, guaranteeing the success once the new products are on the market. Some emerging key factors are (i) price definition: the traditional cost approach methodologies are combined with estimated idea profitability (income approach); (ii) Performance Measurement System (PMS) in NPD projects (taking into consideration conventional economic indicators but also employees creativity and commitment); (iii) evolutionary trends, from a managerial and organisational point of view; (iv) phases of NPD process covered: the clients are progressively less involved in several NPD phases, but maintain fully control over first phase (idea generation) and the last one (commercialisation). The paper is this organised into four different sections: (i) Literature review: description of the conceptual context of this study, giving the basic theoretical background, concepts and definitions; (ii) research objective and methodology: definition of the paper's research objectives and methodology; (iii) empirical study: description of the case studies and analysis of data gathered; (iv) conclusions and managerial implications: discussion of the results and final considerations about the elements able to foster the development of the NPD service market and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of companies within such a market.