Understanding the trade-off between familiarity and newness in product innovation

Abstract

Studying the trade-off between developing new products that exploit a focal firm's familiar current knowledge resources and developing new products that explore knowledge resources that are new to the firm, we show that new products perform better when the new products are neither too familiar nor new to the firm, in contrast to the findings reported in prior research indicating that both types of new products are positively related to new product performance. The results were consistent for the familiarity and newness of both technological and market knowledge. In addition, the study revealed that while focal firms' inter-organizational network ties involving their supplier firms attenuated the potential negative impacts of technological familiarity and newness, their inter-organizational network ties involving their buyer firms lessened the potential negative impacts of the familiarity and newness of market knowledge that their new products required.