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Introduction
One of a company's key strategic processes is the product development process. The ability to identify customer needs and quickly create products that meet these needs and can be produced at a low cost significantly affects the economic success of a company (Ulrich and Eppinger, 2012). Changes in the external environment of the firm necessitate strategic decisions to sustain a competitive advantage. When such decisions involve fundamental design changes of the products offered to the customer, organizational design is most likely affected, requiring organizational change. Change management is the process of continually renewing an organization’s direction, structure and capabilities to serve the changing needs of external and internal customers (Moran and Brightman, 2001). However, previous studies have shown that approximately 70% of planned organizational change initiatives fail (Judge and Douglas, 2009; Al-Haddad and Kotnour, 2015). While knowledge on how to manage the change process is crucial for succeeding in implementing organizational change (Hussain et al., 2018), it is also important to consider the general conditions of the organization that affect its responsiveness to changes in the external environment and ability to perform strategic changes.
Product development is an interdisciplinary activity involving nearly all functions of a company, with the most central ones being marketing, design and manufacturing (Ulrich and Eppinger, 2012). Hence, a change in product development strategy will affect nearly the entire organization. A stream of research that relates to the capability to recognize and react appropriately to changes in the business environment is the dynamic capabilities view. This view accepts the importance of capabilities such as product design and manufacturing but argues that success in volatile industries also requires adaptive processes and structures that enable companies to change these capabilities and to anticipate, shape and adapt to shifting competitive landscapes (Felin and Powell, 2016).
The literature on dynamic capabilities has generated a remarkably rich but often disconnected body of research, pointing in different directions (Barreto, 2010). Dynamic capabilities have been defined and categorized in several ways and are often difficult to identify (Sune and Gibb, 2015). As the theory of dynamic capabilities is somewhat abstract, it is challenging to discuss the impact of dynamic capabilities in practice. Foss and Pedersen (2016) highlight the challenge of providing appropriate advice to managers on...