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Team Foresight in New Product Development Projects

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Abstract

In today’s uncertain business environments, management tools, originally designed for more stable environments, no longer serve the purpose of the organization because high levels of uncertainty make the future difficult to predict entirely. In this sense, foresight, which implies both anticipating and designing the future in a proactive manner, seems to be a rising concept. Despite growing awareness of the importance of foresight capability in terms of predicting and enacting the future, empirical research on team foresight is scant. Based on sensemaking theory, this research explores the antecedents and consequences of team foresight within the context of new product development. In studying the data from 255 new product development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling, this study discovers that team flexibility—in terms of operational flexibility, task autonomy and resource flexibility—is a significant antecedent of team foresight. Moreover, the results particularly emphasize that new product development teams, with a proficiency in visualizing the future through making sense of technology-, market-, and project-related information, can successfully produce new products of quality in a timely manner. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Fatih University, 34500, Büyükçekmece, Istanbul, Turkey

    Atif Açıkgöz, Cemil Kuzey & Halil Zaim

  2. Kocaeli University, Umuttepe, 41380, Kocaeli, Turkey

    Ayşe Günsel

Authors
  1. Atif Açıkgöz
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  2. Ayşe Günsel
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  3. Cemil Kuzey
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  4. Halil Zaim
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Correspondence to Atif Açıkgöz.

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This paper is mainly based on the doctoral dissertation of the first author at Fatih University.

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Açıkgöz, A., Günsel, A., Kuzey, C. et al. Team Foresight in New Product Development Projects. Group Decis Negot 25, 289–323 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-015-9443-9

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