The hidden power of new product development to mitigate supply chain risk

Purpose In recent years, practitioners and academics have devoted increasing attention on supply chain risk management. A limited body of literature covered how new product development (NPD) can contribute to a better management of the supply chain related risks. These contributions, as for example Zsidisin and Smith (2005)'s study, look just at a single practice in the NPD either process or outputs. This gap in the extant literature brought us to set as the main goal of the present work the holistic investigation of which NPD practices and outputs are adopted by companies to mitigate supply chain risk (RQ1) and how (RQ2)? Design/methodology/approach The main variables involved in the research framework to better outline the research questions are: i) NPD practices and product features; ii) Supply chain risk, i.e. probability (of a given supply chain risk source) X negative business impact (March and Shapira, 1987). Seven exploratory case studies were performed, according to our theory building goals (Eisenhardt, 1989) in firms with high innovation performance and a structured NPD process. Originality/value This paper, covering a gap in the extant literature, aim to broaden the range of possible supply chain risks mitigation strategies regarding the NPD process and its outputs: i) internal alignment, ii) upstream and downstream alignment, iii) tapping knowledge from external actors, iv) modularity. Moreover, we discuss the role of "bundles", namely the conjoint adoption of different practices to cope with the same supply chain risk. We thus want to leave to managers the key message to look inside company's boundaries to harness the hidden potential of NPD practices in order to mitigate ex-ante the risks of a supply chain still not fully operational.