Organizational User Participation,Knowledge Conflict And New Product Development Performance

Along with the continuous openness and innovation of the business environment,the organizational user participation has gradually become an important new product development mode for enterprises to search for market opportunities,acquire user knowledge resources and implement joint development due to the automatic formation of supply and sales relationships,and has been recognized as the core strategy for enterprises to improve the performance of new product development under the background of B2 B.According to the theory of open innovation,organizational users help enterprises to efficiently develop new products that can fully meet the needs of organizational users by sharing information such as requirements and solutions with enterprises and undertaking part of the development tasks,which is conducive to enterprises benefiting from inter-organizational knowledge resource interactions and collisions.Therefore,how to improve the performance of new product development through user participation has become a hot topic of common concern in both theoretical and practical circles.Despite the wealth of existing research on the positive impacts of organizational user involvement,however,in practice organizational user involvement tends to exhibit two sides,which can bring many benefits to new product development by stimulating innovative ideas in the exchange of knowledge and helping to find out the best way to accomplish the common task,but also inevitably increase the cost and difficulty of coordination to the enterprise,which brings a negative effect.This raises the debate of how organizational user participation affects new product development performance and the question of how to open the black box of the path between organizational user participation and new product development performance.Considering that knowledge conflict,which is rooted in knowledge heterogeneity,is a common phenomenon in inter-organizational cooperation but has not been explored by academics,this study provides a theoretical framework that introduces knowledge conflict to elucidate the "double-edged sword" mechanism of organizational user involvement on new product development performance,aiming to clarify how organizational user involvement has opposite effects on new product development performance through different types of knowledge conflict,and to provide more in-depth theoretical explanations for the role of the relationship between the two.Since organizational user participation under knowledge-based competitive conditions is essentially a dynamic process of solving new product development problems centered on the sharing and interaction of different knowledge resources among organizations,how enterprises can effectively acquire,integrate,and utilize heterogeneous knowledge resources of organizational users to contribute to the successful development of new products is a key issue faced by enterprises.The knowledge heterogeneity between enterprises and organizational users and the resulting knowledge conflict are inevitable,and this knowledge conflict not only covers the knowledge innovation and learning process,but also brings difficulties and challenges in the coordination and knowledge sharing between organizations.Previous studies have shown that knowledge conflict is a key path for the two-way interaction of knowledge resources between different subjects and affects performance outcomes,so how organizational user involvement affects new product development performance through the mediating role of knowledge conflict,and how enterprises can identify and effectively manage different types of knowledge conflicts that can bring opposite performance outcomes in the process of organizational user involvement,so as to maximize the contribution of organizational user involvement to the enhancement of new product development performance urgently needs to be further explored.In addition,the new product development task inherent uncertainty is affecting the enterprise and organizational users to establish successful cooperation,sharing knowledge resources and knowledge interaction,so understand how the task uncertainty affects the organizational user participation in the role of knowledge conflict is a new product development project management.Finally,the role of organizational flexibility needs to be considered in how firms can respond appropriately and in a timely manner to different types of knowledge conflicts in order to strengthen the positive effects of knowledge conflicts on new product development performance and at the same time weaken the negative effects of knowledge conflicts.Based on this,this study focuses on the following research questions:(1)how organizational user involvement has a "double-edged sword" impact on new product development performance;(2)what is the role of knowledge conflict in the relationship between organizational user involvement and new product development performance;(3)how does task uncertainty affect the relationship between organizational user involvement and knowledge conflict;and(4)what is the role of organizational flexibility in the relationship between knowledge conflict and new product development performance.Around the above issues,this study,from an corporate perspective,in the context of the B2 B market,based on the open innovation theory,knowledge management theory and conflict management theory,systematically sorted out the connotation and theoretical viewpoint of the core variables,explore the mechanism of how organizational user participation affects the performance of new product development through both positive and negative factors,it propose that different types of knowledge conflicts play a parallel role between user participation and new product development performance,That is,to build a theoretical model of "organizational user participation — content knowledge conflict / schematic knowledge conflict-new product development performance",explain the double-edged effect of organizational user participation on new product development performance from content knowledge conflict and framework knowledge conflict and summarize the logical relationship between variables,Both preset task uncertainty and tissue flexibility play an important regulatory role in this model,and the corresponding research hypothesis.In this study,the questionnaire method was used to randomly select samples within several districts and 322 valid samples were obtained to test the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling and Bootstrap method.The research conclusions are as follows:(1)information provision and joint development have a positive impact on both content knowledge conflict and schematic knowledge conflict;(2)Content knowledge conflict positively affects the performance of new product development,schematic knowledge conflict negatively affects the new product development performance;(3)Organizational user involvement positively affects new product development performance through the mediation of content knowledge conflict and negatively affects new product development performance through the mediation of schematic knowledge conflict;(4)Task uncertainty plays a positive regulatory role in the relationship between information provision and content knowledge conflict,between joint development and content knowledge conflict,and between joint development and schematic knowledge conflict;However,it did not play a significant role in regulating between information provision and schematic knowledge conflict;(5)Organizational flexibility plays a positive role in regulating between content knowledge conflict and new product development performance,It plays a negative role in regulating between schematic knowledge conflict and new product development performance.The purpose of this study is to explain the "double-edged sword" influence mechanism of organizational user participation on new product development performance,and the mechanism of knowledge conflict,task uncertainty and organizational flexibility in this process,thus provide theoretical explanation and practical guidance for how to manage organizational user participation,identify different types of knowledge conflicts stimulated in the process,with the help of benign knowledge conflict and eliminate malignant knowledge conflict to improve the performance of new product development.The theoretical contribution and innovation of this study is mainly reflected in the following four aspects:(1)This study reveals the "double-edged sword" effect of organizational user involvement,and demonstrates that there is a complex relationship between information provision and new product development performance,as well as between co-development and new product development performance,with both positive and negative effects.This study makes up for the neglect of the "double-edged sword" effect of organizational user involvement in existing studies,and provides a detailed answer to the question of how organizational user involvement affects new product development performance and a more comprehensive theoretical discussion;(2)This study combines knowledge management theory and conflict management theory and introduces them into the study of organizational user participation and its performance impact,Uncovers the influence path of organizational user participation on new product development performance,Refining the theoretical analysis framework of "organizational user participation-knowledge conflict-new product development performance",exploring the intermediary path role of content knowledge conflict and schematic knowledge conflict in this process.This provides an answer to the contradictory results of previous studies on the impact of user participation on new product development performance;(3)This study is the first to propose task uncertainty as the situational variable and boundary condition of organizational user participation influencing knowledge conflict,to remedy the neglect of task uncertainty from existing user participation and knowledge conflict studies,an important influence of task uncertainty was not considered,to examine whether the role relationship between organizational user participation and knowledge conflict is affected by task uncertainty.(4)This study innovatively explores the role boundary of knowledge conflict from the perspective of organizational flexibility,reveals the moderating effect of organizational flexibility as a boundary condition on the relationship between different types of knowledge conflict and new product development performance,provides new clues for systematically exploring the impact of knowledge conflict on new product development performance,and also provides a guiding direction for enterprises to efficiently manage different types of knowledge conflict.