Prior research suggests that combining exploration and exploitation can ensure firms’ long term performance. However, balancing the two is challenging because of their fundamentally different nature. Collaboration with other companies can be a means to successfully combine exploration and exploitation. Studies on collaboration and its effects on exploration and exploitation tend to adopt an organizational point of view. In this paper, we examine the relationship at a lower aggregation level, studying collaboration between key NPD professionals, representing different firms, in the context of an inter-organizational NPD project. Key NPD professionals are those who have a large influence on the course of an NPD project and can strongly influence its degree of NPD exploration and NPD exploitation. We focus on a particular dyadic collaboration, namely, the collaboration between an external professional designer, hired by the company to assist in a particular NPD project, and the internal NPD project manager. External professional designers normally contribute to clients’ NPD by means of idea generation and/or translating these ideas into actual product concepts. We investigate the similarities and dissimilarities of professional designers and NPD project managers, in particular in terms of their experience in exploration and exploitation. We study how these similarities and dissimilarities influence NPD outcomes by means of a quantitative study of 44 NPD projects. Our results indicate that dissimilarity in exploration experience of designers and NPD managers positively influences NPD exploration; dissimilarity in exploitation experience positively influences NPD exploitation. These results provide management insight into how to construct effective NPD dyads for NPD exploitation and NPD exploration.