Unpacking the importance of intangible skills in new product development and sustainable business performance; strategies for marketing managers

Firms need sufficient resources (tangible and intangible) and capabilities to build unique products due to customers’ demands and choices, market competition and globalization. Despite sufficient resources, many firms cannot build new products according to the customers’ preferences and market trends due to lack of marketing capabilities, lack of skilled marketing staff and lack of experienced managers. However, studies have not yet examined what types of intangible skills of marketing managers are prominent for building new products. This study examines the importance of the intangible skills; intellectual captial, financial literacy and business experience in new product development that results in sustainable competitive performance. We used a mixed-method approach; questionnaire (283) and interviews (16) for data collection and then applied structural equation modelling for testing the hypotheses. The results revealed that all the three intangible skills; intellectual captial, financial literacy and business experience significant influence new product development and sustainable competitive performance. However, considering the relative importance, financial literacy and intellectual capital are the most significant predictors of sustainable competitive performance and new product development respectively. Moreover, new product development fully mediates the path between intellectual capital and sustainable competitive performance while it partially mediates the link between financial literacy, business experience and sustainable competitive performance. Considering the importance of tangible resources, our study scrutinized that financial resources have a significant influence on new product development and sustainable competitive performance while technological resources do not play a significant role. This research recommends firms to emphasize on the improvement of intangible skills of the managers in order to build new products that result in sustainable competitive position. This study also recommends marketing managers to improve their financial skills and experience by participating in various seminars and workshops that can spur their new idea generation and new product development capabilities.