Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2020
There is little tolerance for deviation in time, budget and quality in the execution of product development projects. On the other hand, the project environment is gaining complexity. Changes on project scope are daily business. We set up an initial hypothesis, that unplanned changes -newness- has negative impact on projects. We developed and executed therefore a survey about factors belonging to innovation, complexity and newness to test their perceived impact on project success. Our data show a positive correlation between unsuccessful projects and newness, which is discussed in the paper.