R&D/Marketing Interface in a Firm's Capability-Building Process: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Firms

A considerable number of studies have been assembled over the last decade on the management of the R&D/marketing interface in product innovation. Most of these studies focus on the R&D/marketing interface as a self-contained unit of analysis, offering little explanation of the interface's contribution to a firm's competence building in ways essential to innovation success. This paper is based upon research that demonstrates that the importance of the R&D/marketing interface lies in its dynamic capability in influencing the direction of product development projects towards enhancing existing, or building new, competencies. The case study results show that the shared tasks performed by R&D and marketing departments are concentrated in three areas, i.e. corporate conceptual development (CCD), product conceptual development (PCD) and project implementation (Ip). The results reveal that the performance of the cross-functional team in general, and the R&D/marketing interface in particular, during a project's implementation, is heavily dependent on earlier activities in the areas of CCD and PCD. The former usually involves a sustained period of company-wide strategic preparation, which may or may not be directly targetted at a specific project, whilst the latter refers to previous co-operative experience at the project level. The evidence shows that, even when top management attempts to build an instant platform (e.g. by means of heavyweight project management), in the absence of such earlier activities, the effectiveness of this kind of platform has been far from satisfactory, thus pinpointing the vital importance of learning-before-doing in the innovation process.