Abstract

The concern of this thesis is to understand how business-to-business service companies achieve success in their program of international new product development. Literature exists on the topics of new product development (NPD), services marketing, and international marketing. But, little research has combined these areas and focused on new service development (NSD) for international markets. Moreover, no study has looked at the firm's NPD process--i.e., the stages and activities undertaken to bring a new product from idea to market launch-and how this impacts NPD performance, internationally. This thesis focuses on the specific topic of the NPD process and its impact on success in developing and marketing new business-to-business services for international markets. The research identifies and describes the dimensions that define the NSD process used for developing new services for international markets, and shows how these are linked to various measures of performance. Factor and reliability analyses yield a set of 11 descriptive NSD process dimensions; and correlation, multiple regression, and t-test analyses offer insights about what NSD process activities and approaches managers should focus on to achieve success.