Imitation or innovation? New ventures’ NPD strategies in emerging markets

ABSTRACT

New product development (NPD) plays a pivotal role in the survival, growth, and performance of new ventures; existing studies, however, have paid scant attention to new ventures’ trade-offs between imitative and innovative NPD strategies, particularly in emerging markets. This study explores the relative impact of innovative and imitative NPD on new venture performance and their contingency across different entrepreneurial motivations and institutional environments in China. The findings based on a multilevel dataset from China indicate that innovative NPD has a stronger positive effect on new venture performance than imitative NPD. In addition, opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship and privatisation enhance the effect of innovative NPD whereas attenuate the efficacy of imitative NPD.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovative NPD
• Imitative NPD
• entrepreneurial motivations
• privatisation
• new venture performance

JEL CODES:

• M13
• O32

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72202080) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, HUST (No. 2022WKYXQN032). We are grateful to Associate Editor Bram Timmermans and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The results are available upon request.