The role of purchasing in product development : a summary of four years research

The role of purchasing in product development has increasingly become a popular subject both with researchers and practitioners. However, much of the available research has important shortcomings. Most importantly, it fails to address explicitly the role of purchasing in areas related to product development other than single development projects. We argue that there are five separate yet closely related areas in which purchasing related activities can be distinguished with respect to product development processes. These activities can all be related to a limited number of key processes across the different areas, which form the essence of purchasing involvement in product development. This framework of areas and activities has been developed on the basis of two series of case studies. In order to get some indications on the universality of this framework, a survey has been carried out, as well as a third series of case studies.