Developing Collaborative Product Development Capabilities: The Case of Fast Fashion

Collaborative product development capabilities support a company’s product innovation activities. In the context of the fast fashion sector, this paper examines the development of the product development capabilities (PDC) that align product development capabilities in a dual innovation context, one, slow paced, where the firm is well established and the other, fast paced, which represents a new competitive arena in which the company competes. To understand the process associated with collaborative capability development, we studied three Scandinavian fashion companies pursuing ‘dual innovation strategies’. Our analyses suggest that developing such collaboration capabilities benefits from the search for complementary practices, the combination of learning styles, and the development of weak and strong ties. Results also underscore the crucial importance of co-evolution of multi-level, simultaneous learning processes and highlight the role of human agency in capability development with partners. Building on our analyses, we advance propositions for future research and managerial practices on developing dynamic collaboration capabilities.