K Rajeshwari and Shameem Shagirbasha
New product development is one the most important activities in an organisation. It is considered risky as well as complex, but needs to be undertaken for the survival and growth of organisations. Startups are those organisations that develop and launch new products and services in the market place . They are characterised by the presence of a founder member and a small set of employees. The literature on NPD highlight strategy, organisation culture, resouce availability and NPD process as success factors. Of these organisational culture is one of the most important ones and has been studied in detail. Prior studies on startups cover ecosystem, open innovation, knowledge and adversity management but there is hardly any study on what affects the NPD success in startups. Hence the focus of this study is to address this gap- to understand how organisational culture affects NPD in startups. Through a combination of literature review and indepth interviews among 32 startup personnel, this article has arrived at a set of four propositions and a conceptual model on what affects NPD success in startups. Respondent sample was chosen from public databases and cross checks done by multiple researchers during transription, in order to ensure sufficient variance, reliability and replicability in the qualitative research. The four propositions that emerged were- Top management involvement, internal startup team cohesion, a flexible NPD process and a culture of failure tolerance.The empirical model shows the relationship between these and NPD success. The studyâs biggest contribution is its pioneering nature in this area of startup and NPD success. It also offers a theoretical contribution by way of model development and further research scope to validate the propositions, by converting them into hypotheses. Managers and practitioners have immense learnings by way of what is the kind of culture they should put in place in order to succeed in Startups.