The Stage is Yours – How to Involve Customers in Multiple NPD Stages

Abstract

At the interface of innovation and marketing literature, scholars discuss the effects of customer involvement on new product performance. Influencing factors seem to be the stages of firms’ new product development (NPD) processes. However, to date, the effectiveness of customer involvement in NPD stages is unclear, since research disagrees on the NPD stage in which customer involvement enhances new product performance most. Given the fragmented and inconclusive research findings, this study aims to shed more light on the ongoing debate. It introduces a new perspective on how customer involvement drives new product performance by integrating a multi-stage perspective with different customer involvement forms. Based on the customer involvement framework developed by Cui and Wu (2016; 2017), we examine the influence of two different customer involvement forms along the NPD process stages on new product market performance. Thereby, we utilize cross-sector survey data from 272 NPD managers and hierarchical regression analysis to unravel that the success pattern for customer involvement along multiple NPD stages differs for both investigated forms. Thus, this study highlights the importance of the stage-related perspective and the need to distinguish between different customer involvement forms.