After the 1990s, many scholars and enterprises focused on the integration of the organizational structure [17-20]. Specialized departments should be integrated to complete overall target because specialization alone is not sufficient for high performance [21]. Internal organizational integration is that different departments support and cooperate with each other, and involve in new product project in order to achieve the success of the new product development. R&D-marketing integration is a part of the internal organization. Therefore, this study is to explore the R&D-marketing integration in the new product development process in order to achieve goals.

Scholars investigated R&D-marketing integration from different perspectives. Some scholars concerned “quantity” aspects of R&D-marketing integration, such as interaction frequency [8,22]. Appropriate interaction frequency is necessary for integration, but it does not mean that their communication is effective. Then, in order to better measure the constructive cooperation and the degree of inherent team cooperation, some scholars selected the “quality” aspects of R&D-marketing integration. Song et al. [18] proposed that R&D-marketing integration should focus on the degree of interdependence and information sharing. Kahn [23] argued that R&Dmarketing integration was more extensive cooperation, including the behavior and attitude aspects. The behavior aspect meant that the two departments worked together to share progress and resources. The attitude aspect was that the two departments understand each other to achieve collective goals. His interpretation of the R&D-marketing integration was more comprehensive. Leenders and Wierenga [14] divided R&D-marketing integration into three parts, communication, collaboration, and good relationships. In fact, communication and collaboration can be seen as the behavioral aspect and good relationships as the attitudes aspect. Their views about R&D-marketing integration are essentially consistent. We define integration as the degree to which there is collaboration, communication, and good relationships between marketing and R&D [14].

R&D-marketing integration as a complex concept should be multidimensional in empirical research. Leenders and Wierenga [14] measured R&D-marketing integration with three dimensions of communication, collaboration and cooperative relationships. The scales are widely used by later research [12,24]. Communication means that the two departments share information accurately, credibly and timely. Collaboration refers to participation of different functional departments in the new product development process. Cooperative relationships refers to the degree of maintain an effective collaborative link between the R&D department and the marketing department.

Performance is the generalization of efficient achievement and effectiveness that managers operate the enterprise [25]. Different studies use different definitions and measurements of performance based on its own research purposes. Performance in this study includes business performance and social performance.

The measurement of business performance is complex and diverse, including two types: one is based on objective measurement of financial indicators, such as turnover, profits and other financial indicators; another is subjective evaluation. The latter asks senior management to subjectively evaluate sales, market share growth, and profitability indicators, compared with the expected subjective evaluation [26-28], or compared with industry competitors [29,30]. Objective data is more objective and accurate, but it is not easy to obtain [31]. Then many scholars chose the subjective evaluation. Dess and Robinson [32] confirmed that objective data and subjective data were strongly correlated. If the reliability and validity of subjective scales meet the requirements, then the results are credible. This study use the subjective evaluation measurement compared with the industry average.

With the development of performance evaluation, scholars have noted that the enterprises are getting closer and closer to government, consumers, environment and other external stakeholders. The enterprises are concerned about the improvement of business performance, as well as external interests, namely the impact of enterprises on the environment and other aspects. The measurement of corporate social performance does not reach a consensus, but mostly have chosen subjective indicators. For example, He and Wang [33] suggested that we should give more consideration to the social impact of the management, such as whether to raise the income and living standards of producers, whether to cause serious pollution, and whether to raise the industry overall technical level. They used four dimensions of social responsibility, social sensitivity, social justice and quality of life to subjectively measure corporate social performance.

In an increasingly competitive environment, individual departments can no longer independently accomplish the task of new product development and increase business performance. Integration of departments, especially the R&D-marketing integration plays an increasingly important role in the success of new product development. Internal R&D-marketing integration includes sharing market and technical information, as well as involving the R&D process and the marketing process. The success of new products requires technical support and products for market need. Marketing department provides customer and market information [8]. R&D department deploys resources to research and develop new products which have a competitive advantage. Information sharing and a high degree of trust help enterprises make a better strategic decision [34]. Creative staff in R&D and marketing departments collaborates to develop new ideas and produce more effective and flexible ideas [35]. Joint decision-making between R&D department and marketing department has more advantages than a single sector in data collection, information processing, and evaluation of program results and new solutions. The high degree of integration will improve product quality and shorten the development cycle of new products [18], thus speeding up innovation.

R&D-marketing integration included communication, collaboration, and cooperative relationships [14]. In communication aspect, R&D-marketing integration is more conducive to the use of the information [36]. Marketing and R&D share updated market information. R&D department can understand the needs of the market in the new product development. Products that meet market demand will increase market share and reduce new product market risk. Communication can promote the implementation of the marketing plan through information sharing. At the same time, R&D department and marketing department share technical information. Marketing department can understand the latest technology information and help enterprises to seek new growth point. In collaboration aspect, R&D and marketing work together in the R&D process. It can help R&D department more rapidly improve product quality and shorten the development process. Without participation of marketing department, enterprises may produce products that do not meet the needs of the market. It will lead to a waste of resources and enterprises may lose the opportunity to capture the market. In marketing activities, R&D department can help marketing department to develop marketing programs more according to the characteristics of the new product. It can help to promote the success of marketing programs to bring better income. Krohmer et al. [37] confirmed that marketing activities in the case of the R&D department involved has a more obvious positive influence on the performance. As for cooperative relationships, communication between members is conducive to the establishment and maintenance of good relationships. If a harmonious relationship exists, R&D and marketing have a better understanding of each other’s point of view and the rationale behind positions on different decisions [38]. It prevents the conflict of R&Dmarketing, improve the efficiency of the new product development and complete the team task.

Many literatures have confirmed that effective R&D-marketing integration is the main factors of new product success [11,19,38]. Many companies cash flow will increases in the future because of new product success. R&D-marketing integration will result in more competitive advantages and increase the success rate of innovation [39]. Therefore, R&D-marketing integration has a positive effect on business performance. Based on the above analysis, we introduced the following hypothesis:

H1: R&D-marketing integration has a positive influence on business performance.

In the study of R&D-marketing integration and firm performance, little literature has discussed the social performance. Wind [40] studied cross-functional integration and mentioned that in marketing activities with R&Dmarketing integration, existing or new products and services, not only meet the needs of current customers or new customers, but also improve their related interests, e.g. the customers’ quality of life. While meet consumer demands, enterprises expand the existing market share and increase production and sales of current products. It will improve existing technical level of the industry, destroy the equilibrium of the original market, and generate a new growth point [40]. This shows that R&D-marketing integration will help improve productivity level and technical level. Additionally, in the research and development of new products process, enterprises should consider reducing the damage to the environment, which is the common pursuit of the parties of the government and consumers. Marketing department conveys this demand to R&D department, and help R&D department to create a new green product. R&D-marketing integration will finally achieve the purpose of the protection and improvement of the ecological environment. Therefore, R&D-marketing integration will improve the income level of the stakeholders, the level of productivity, technology level, and the protection and improvement of the ecological environment. This means it has a positive role in promoting the performance. Based on the above analysis, we propose a hypothesis:

H2: R&D-marketing integration has a positive influence on social performance.

Literature has widely discussed the relationship between business performance and social performance. There are a variety of different views. Some literatures believe that they are negatively correlated [41] or not significantly related [42]. Most literatures had verified the positive relationship between them [8,43-46].

Enterprises with better business performance will have sufficient resources to undertake social responsibility more actively [47]. Enterprises could properly handle the relationship with external stakeholders to meet external stakeholders’ demand, increase employee income relatively, and protect the consumers’ living standards and environment. Uadiale and Fagbemi [45] confirmed that the higher business performance, the more attention the enterprise will pay to the long-term development and environmental management. In reality, those attaching more importance to the social responsibility are just enterprises with better business performance. Therefore, in addition to the R&D-marketing integration has a direct impact on the social performance, R&D-marketing integration possible have indirect effects to the social performance through the business performance. We put forward the hypothesis:

H3: Business performance has a positive influence on social performance.

There are several reasons for taking agricultural science and technology enterprises as the object of this study. Firstly, agricultural science and technology enterprises have important roles in improving the agricultural productivity, promoting the rural development and increasing the farmers’ incomes. Agriculture in China has an important role that is the basis of the development of national economy. The issues concerning agriculture, countryside and farmers are always the hot topics. Due to the particularity and the important roles of China’s agricultural science and technology enterprises, the process of technological innovation is different from other high-tech enterprises. Some scholars have explored the problem of technological innovation of agricultural science and technology enterprises [48,49].

Secondly, compared to other agricultural enterprises, agricultural science and technology enterprises have stronger capability of technological innovation, and the degree of integration of R&D-marketing may be higher and different [22]. Agricultural science and technology enterprises mainly engage in the agricultural technological innovation and the related activities of industrialization, e.g., the development and application of new technologies about agriculture. The main purposes are to develop the high-tech agricultural products and realize the large-scale production by relying on their own R&D or introducing the foreign advanced research achievements [50]. The integration of R&D-marketing of agricultural science and technology enterprises may have some different findings. 

Finally, social performance is an important factor in the performance evaluation of the agricultural science and technology enterprises. Agricultural science and technology enterprises not only pay attention to the output growth and the increased market share, but also attach more importance to the stakeholders, the government, farmers and the environment [51]. Thus it’s reasonable to choose agricultural science and technology enterprises.

We used existing scales as much as possible, adapted some existing scales from the literature, and modified scales according to the characteristics of agricultural science and technology enterprises.

The scales of R&D-marketing integration adapted the scale of Leenders and Wierenga [14], including three dimensions of communication, collaboration and cooperative relationships. Since the original scale was in English, and its research object was the pharmaceutical industry, repeated correction was made. First of all, we translated the original scale into Chinese, and then translated it back into English to ensure the accuracy. The preliminary scale was formed through this process. Then, the scales included three dimensions of communication, cooperative relationships and collaboration with 11 items, such as “The two departments can communicate relevant information honestly”, “In order to complete the task of marketing (sales), the two departments will share resources”.

The performance is divided into two dimensions: business performance and social performance. The business performance is reflected by items, such as growth in sales revenue, market share growth, and gross profit margin. Social performance items include the improvement of farmers’ income, the improvement of agricultural productivity and agricultural technology. In this study, the respondents need to make the subjective evaluation according to the average level of the industry. It can not only avoid the drawbacks that the data is hard to get, but also ensure the accuracy of data. We used 3 and 3 items to measure the business and social performance respectively.

The measures used are the 7-point Likert-type scales with the anchors 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. The questionnaire is divided into two parts. The first part is the scale of R&D-marketing integration, business performance and social performance. The second part is the basic information of enterprises, including the name of the firm, the types of innovation, firm age and size. The types of innovation include the independent innovation, cooperative innovation and imitative innovation. The firm size is measured by the number of employees. Based on the previous literature and the characteristics of agricultural science and technology enterprises, the initial scales were formed. According to suggestions of marketing experts and the managers of agricultural science and technology enterprises, the initial scales were appropriate modified and the final scales were formed.

It took us four months to gather data. These samples are mainly distributed in Guangdong, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, et al. We mainly selected the face-toface interviews and e-mail methods. The respondents mainly are medium and senior managements in R&D department or marketing department that are familiar with the contents of the investigation.

In this study, we collected 317 valid questionnaires. In the 317 samples, 60% of all the enterprises are small and medium-sized enterprises that have less than 200 employees. 77.6% of the samples are private enterprises. Nearly 60% of enterprises choose independent innovation and 33.4% of the enterprises select the mode of cooperative innovation. The remaining enterprises choose the imitative innovation. 34.1% of enterprises invest the relatively more R&D expenses that are more than 3% of the total sales revenue.

The SPSS17.0 statistical software was used to measure the reliability of scales. To establish the internal consistency of the measures, we computed Cronbach’s alpha coefficients. Table 1 is the coefficients of Cronbach’s α. All the coefficients are higher than 0.70 that are the evaluation criteria.

This study used two ways to ensure content validity of scale. Firstly, the scales of R&D-marketing integration and enterprise performance came from the published literature that many scholars have used. Secondly, all the

scales have been reviewed by marketing experts and the senior management of agricultural science and technology enterprises.

This study used the structural equation modeling (SEM) and AMOS 7.0 software to carry out the confirmatory factor analysis that can further verify the validity of scales. The measurement model provides a reasonable fit to the data (χ² = 273.250, df = 113, GFI = 0.909, CFI = 0.967, TLI = 0.960, RMSEA = 0.067). GFI, CFI and TLI all exceed the recommended threshold level of 0.90. The RMSEA is below 0.08 which is acceptable levels. The fit indexes are within the acceptable range. Table 2 shows the results of the confirmatory factor analysis. Except the item of the improvement of agricultural technology, the factor loadings of all the items are more than 0.50. And the T values are more than 2 (see Table 3). The average extracted (AVE) is also more than 0.50. Based on the analysis above, the scales all had satisfactory reliability and validity.

Table 4 shows descriptive statistics on the three dimensions of the R&D-marketing integration, in which each dimension data was measured as the mean of the question items. The means of three dimensions are between 5 and 6, namely between “good and “relatively good” in the above the average level, which shows that R&Dmarketing integration can be improved in the future. On the other hand, by comparing the data of three dimensions, the mean of communication is the lowest, and the variance is the highest, which indicated that the enterprise integration is relatively poor in communication, and data is much different.

The study uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the hypotheses. Figure 1 shows the proposed structural model. The fit of the model is satisfactory (χ² = 273.250, df = 113; GFI = 0.909; RMSEA = 0.067; CFI = 0.967; TLI = 0.960; IFI = 0.967). The test and the results of the model data is shown in Table 2. It also indicates that there is a significant relationship between R&Dmarketing integration and performance in agricultural science and technology enterprises.

Estimated parameter ß1 = 0.541, p < 0.01 supports hypothesis H1, which proves the positive effect of R&Dmarketing integration on business performance. It indicates that the higher the degree of R&D-marketing integration, the better business performance, which is consistent with the generally accepted view [18,38]. R&Dmarketing integration is a key factor in the improvement of business performance. On one hand, market information can be transferred to the R&D department through R&D-marketing integration, which makes enterprises to quickly produce and supply products or services to meet consumer demand, thereby enhancing business performance. On the other hand, technical information can be conveyed to the marketing department through R&Dmarketing integration, which makes enterprises to highlight the core technology in marketing programs to distinguish with the existed market products, and increase revenue. In addition, the marketing department can help R&D department look for new application method of technology, so as to shorten the development cycle, save development costs, and increase business performance relatively.

The results also provide evidence to support hypothesis H2. The estimated parameter ß2 = 0.223, p <0.01 shows that R&D-marketing integration has a positive influence on social performance. It shows that the higher degree of R&D-marketing integration, the better social performance. The marketing department transfers not only the market demand to the R&D department, but also enterprise’s social responsibility requirements of outside. R&D and marketing department supervise each other,

^***Correlation is significant at the 0.001 level. ^aFixed parameter.

Note: ^***the level of significance is less than 0.001 (P < 0.001).

and work together to produce products which meet the market demand.

Estimated parameter ß3 = 0.608, p <0.01 supports hypothesis H3, which shows that business performance has a positive impact on social performance. The business performance can be seen as a mediating variable between integration and social performance. This argument is consistent with most scholars that business performance and social performance has a positive correlation [43-46,52]. This study also verifies a mediating role of business performance between R&D-marketing integration and social performance. And R&D-marketing integration affects social performance through business performance. Moreover, the indirect effect of R&D-marketing integration on social performance is greater than the direct effect, which indicates that R&D-marketing integration improve social performance mainly by improving business performance.

Results show that R&D-marketing integration has a positive impact on business performance. We analyze the reasons for that from three aspects: communication, cooperative relationships and collaboration [14].

In communication aspect, R&D-marketing integration is more conducive to the use of the information [36]. Through integration, marketing and R&D department share updated market information. R&D department can take the needs of clients into consideration during development and produce the viable products, thus increasing market share and reduce the market risk of new product. What’s more, communication can promote the implementation of the marketing plan through information sharing. R&D and marketing department share technical information as well. Marketing department can know the newly technology and help enterprises to seek new growth point. As for cooperative relationships, communication between members contributes to the establishment and maintenance of good relationships. With a harmonious relationship, R&D and marketing department can have a better understanding of each other and it is effective to reduce conflicts, improve efficiency and complete new product development smoothly. The managers believe that R&D-marketing integration can bring resources sharing and integration of resources, which can help the enterprise access new technologies, enter new markets, and improve performance. Collaboration means R&D and marketing department work together in the process of new products research and development. It helps R&D department improve the products’ quality and simplify the development process. Without participation of marketing department, enterprises may produce products that do not meet the needs of market, which leads to a waste of resources and a missed opportunity to capture the market. In marketing activities, R&D department can help marketing department to develop marketing plans according to the characteristics of the new product. It is important factor for successful implementation of marketing plans and profit improvement.

In general, for agricultural science and technology enterprises, R&D-marketing integration helps a lot informing competitive capability and improving business performance.

Our results show that R&D-marketing integration has a significant effect on social performance. The new products can bring about notable results in expanding the range of products and increasing the technical level of the industry. Therefore the marketing competition pattern will be changed. And enterprises can get new chances to develop well [40]. Additionally, what marketing department transfers to R&D department is not only market information, but also social responsibility requirements of enterprises. For instance, enterprises should decrease damage and pollution for the environment in the process of research and development, which has been drawing much attention from consumers and governments. R&D and marketing department supervise each other, and work together to produce green products. Through R&Dmarketing integration, development of enterprises can be better coordinative and united with the protection and improvement of ecological environment. Thus, for agricultural science and technology enterprises, R&D-marketing integration is beneficial for superior social performance.

The results also show that business performance has important influences on social performance. High business performance is the foundation of enhancing social performance. The agricultural science and technology enterprises, which play an important role in agricultural development, take on the great social responsibility. The development of agricultural science and technology enterprises helps solve the employment problem of China’s rural areas, increase the income of farmers, improve agricultural productivity. Enterprises with superior economic strength are more likely to buy equipments for sewage treatment, pay more attention to environment protection and devote to the development of the surrounding rural areas. They may successfully handle the relationship with external stakeholders, relatively increase the income of employees, and enhance the consumers’ living standards. So the premise of the development of social performance is the business performance. This study also verifies a mediating role of business performance between R&D-marketing integration and social performance. The effect of R&D-marketing integration on social performance was partially mediated by business performance.