Abstract
Involving customers in the new product development process has been found to create knowledge benefit for the firm. However, the different roads leading to a firm’s knowledge benefit through configurations of which new product development stage customers are engaged in, a firm’s internal co-creation-related capabilities, and the external environment have yet to be specified. To explore the alternative configurational paths to generating knowledge benefit through customer participation, a state-of-the-art fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is applied to a sample of 181 new product development projects. The results reveal six different configurations to generate knowledge benefit in the new product development process and yield useful suggestions for obtaining knowledge benefit through customer participation.
Highlights
Firms frequently develop new products in collaboration with customers (Morgan, Obal, and Jewell 2021)
The findings offer several theoretical contributions to the literature on customer participation in the new product development (NPD) process
This study contributes to the customer participation literature by identifying six equifinal configurational paths for firms to achieve great knowledge benefit through engaging customers in the NPD process
Summary
Firms frequently develop new products in collaboration with customers (Morgan, Obal, and Jewell 2021). All firms that engage customers in their NPD processes do not realize these knowledge benefits in reality This is because obtaining knowledge benefits through customer participation is not merely the outcome of integrating customers in NPD but is the result of a causally complex phenomenon in which many interconnected factors simultaneously come into play. Research on knowledge management highlights the importance of a firm’s ability to transfer external knowledge, integrate the knowledge with a firm’s existing knowledge stock and apply it to a new product (i.e., a firm’s absorptive capacity; Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Morgan, Obal, and Anokhin 2018), and efficiently and effectively coordinate the co-creation process between the NPD team and customers (i.e., a firm’s coordination capability; Fang, Palmatier, and Evans 2008). The influence of external environmental turbulence including the complexity of customer needs, competitive intensity, and technical turbulence on the effectiveness of customer participation has been long suggested as a key factor in the creation of knowledge benefit (Morgan, Anokhin, and Wincent 2019)
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