Open Innovation, IT Orientation, and External Collaboration: Implications for the Use of New Media and Social Networking IT in New Product Development

Abstract

This research is at the intersection of open innovation and the use of information technology (IT) to improve new product development (NPD) performance. We investigate how a firm’s open innovation climate, its IT orientation, and its external collaboration breadth influence the usage of new media (i.e. project wikis, cloud-based file sharing, and dedicated open innovation artifacts) and social networking IT (i.e. weblogs, Twitter, and Facebook/LinkedIn/GooglePlus) across the NPD process. We also examine the influence of the usage of these media on NPD process performance and subsequent project performance.We collected data from 198 USA respondents and 152 Australian respondents to test a set of nine hypotheses. Results show that an outward focus has a negative impact on the use of new media and social networking IT. Reflexivity, and innovation and flexibility, had no significant impact on the use of new media and social networking IT. These results were stable between both countries. IT infrastructure positively influenced new media and social networking IT in Australia but not in the USA. The number of external collaborators also had a positive effect on the usage of new media and social networking IT only in the Australian sample. Interestingly, new media IT had a positive impact on NPD performance while social networking IT had no effect on NPD performance in both countries. Finally, NPD process performance had a positive impact on NPD project performance in both countries. Our chapter concludes with a discussion of our findings and their implications for research and managerial practice.