How does process innovation relate to new product development? The purpose of this paper is to find a provisional answer to this question from a detailed case study on the development process of a specialty chemical. In general, new product development is regarded as synonymous with product innovation. In addition, product innovation and process innovation are supposedly related to each other but clearly distinguished. Typically, these ideas are presuppositions of the famous Abernathy and Utterback (A-U) model of innovation. However, several studies have asserted that they do not hold in the area of specialty chemicals. This paper confirms the close relationship between new product development and process innovation in specialty chemicals with a detailed case study of resin P, developed by a Japanese company.
This paper analyzes the development process of resin P through the MAIS approach, which focuses on the interactions among material entities (M), actors (A), and institutional/structural factors (I/S) related to the process of new product development. The case analysis clarifies how various material entities, actors, and institutional/structural factors interact with one another and shows that process innovation is indispensable for the development of the new specialty chemical. It also reveals that individual actors such as a researcher who continued experiments under objections, organizational actors such as product development sectors and process development sectors that collaborated for the development of the new chemical, material entities such as the solvent, and institutional/structural factors such as cost estimation, environmental regulation, and corporate customers’ approval were all related to the development of the product. The result also shows the effectiveness of the MAIS approach as an analytical m ethod for innovation processes.
