Abstract
New product development plays an important role in the contemporary competitive circumstance. However, most of new product introduced to the market did not reach their business objectives. The phenomenon has led to a lot of studies trying to identify determinants of the success and failure of new products. Among those determinants, the launch strategy and the product innovativeness are discussed frequently in past researches. As for product innovativeness, there exist three contradictive results when treating it as a dependent variable which directly effects on new product performance. Thus, this study examined the impact of launch strategy on new product performance and treated product innovativeness as a moderate variable.There are two dimensions of launch strategy: strategic launch decisions and tactical launch decisions. Product innovativeness included product superiority to the customer, market newness to the firm, and adoption difficulty to the customer. This study indicates that strategic launch decisions have a positive effect on new product performance. However, the analyses also show that there are no enough evidence to link the tactical launch decisions and new product performance. The moderating effects of product innovativeness are examined. First, “product superiority to the customer” had a positive moderating effect on new product performance. Second, “market newness to the firm” had a negative moderating effect on new product performance. Surprisingly, adoption difficulty to the customer did not have a significant moderating effect on new product performance.