Do Social Media Tools Impact the Development Phase? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collaboratively design, manage, and launch new products and services. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what influence these newITtools have onNPDperformance. Through a project‐level, exploratory, empirical study, the impact of these newITtools on the development phase of theNPDprocess is investigated. We find that the use of these new tools is significantly lower than the adoption of traditionalITtools such as e‐mail and computer‐aided‐design. Traditional tools have a significant, positive impact onNPDoutcomes, including team collaboration, the concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Interestingly, new media tools such as project wikis and shared collaboration spaces also have a significant, positive impact on concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Surprisingly, social networking tools like weblogs andTwitter negatively impact management evaluation while having no impact onNPDteam collaboration and concepts/prototypes generated. These results suggest that social networking tools in their current guise are not helpful to theNPDteam and may in fact be distracting to innovation management during the development phase.