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Due to continuous changes in consumer needs, new product development (NPD) and innovation are some of a company’s key factors of success and competitiveness. In order to be successful, companies have to understand consumer needs and ‘translate them into new products’1. If changing consumer perceptions and their requirements are not respected by a firm, a product’s sales will decrease as people no longer feel satisfied with the old product and require new functions. Therefore, a major task in business is being close to the customer. In order to collect ideas about product perceptions, institutions and departments within a company staying in direct contact with consumers can be essential. One department that represents a customer-oriented sector is sales, as their day-to-day business includes communication with customers.
However, failure rates of new product launches are still very high. According to a study of Serviceplan and Gfk where 265 newly launched products were analyzed, 70% of these failed and were no longer bought after only one year.2 A firm’s difficulties in generating ideas in the early stages of NPD have been ‘identified as major cause of notoriously high failure rates of new products’3. One possible reason is that information received by the sales department is not communicated clearly enough to Research & Development (R&D), which is in charge of developing new products. For this reason consumer needs are often not adequately integrated into the process of new product development and relevant information concerning their requirements can get lost.
The question as to how the customer-oriented sales department can be better involved into the process of new product development in order to ensure the success of new product introductions will be discussed in the following.
Analyse von Fusionen im Hinblick auf wettbewerbsökonomische und wettbewerbsrechtliche Auswirkungen
(2018)
The rising number of mergers between companies over the past decades indicates their growing importance on economic behaviour. Nevertheless, their consequences can influence competition and need to be regulated. This work answers to the question on how mergers can impact competition, thus actual and potential competitors, customers, consumers and upstream- or downstream firms. It is investigated how merger control laws and procedures are influenced by economic theories on merger effects. In the end, latest cases are checked for real application of theoretical statements and for authorities’ challenges. To find results, competition laws and control methods of authorities are compared to traditional economic literature and empirical studies on merger effects. A synthetisation of this comparison is made by analysing three up-to-date merger case examples. The results show that the most important impacts result from market power and efficiencies which can influence mainly prices and innovation activities of a market. Depending on specific structural characteristics of each market, methods and outcomes can be different case-by-case. Competition authorities are emphasizing the use of a combination of traditional economic models and flexible analysis methods to decide whether a merger can potentially harm competition and needs to be prohibited. Current cases show the importance of specific market structures and companies’ characteristics on the way decisions are made. Efficiencies and market power effects are weighed up against each other to evaluate mergers. Especially the emergence of new markets represents a challenge for future merger control. The complexity of defining each market’s specific theory of harm is also emphasized. To sum up, merger control nowadays is based mainly on economic approaches and exact merger evaluation methods always depend on specific market conditions.