Determinants Of Individuals' Information Seeking Behavior In New Product Developments

With the development of economic globalization in the information age, information has become the decisive resource for the success of enterprises. As for high-tech enterprises which survive mostly on the foundation of science and technology innovation, whether the R & D staff in the department could use a variety of information sources to access to information in order to complete the new product development projects, is critical for the enterprise in the competition. In the past researches of information seeking behavior, there are a lot of analyses concerning the variables of the use of information sources. Nevertheless, there were little systematic studies on the factors of the use of information sources in the task-oriented situation towards the R & D department's staff. Therefore, a comprehensive study on how to build a systematic, task-oriented information seeking model has important practical value and theoretical significance.After reviewing the analyses of the two major factors of information seeking behavior, quality and accessibility; the analyses on the division of task characteristics and their effect on information seeking behavior; the classic models of human behavior, from TRA to UTAUT, the paper developed a two-stage model concerning information seeking behavior in task-oriented situation, then validated the effects of quality and accessibility towards the intention of using information sources, the effect of facilitating conditions towards the actual use of information sources, and the moderating effects of experience and task characteristics through empirical study.The major conclusions are as follows:For the basic model: The effect of quality towards intention is validated in personal-internal, personal-external, impersonal-internal and impersonal-external information sources; the effect of accessibility towards intention is validated in the two impersonal sources; and the effect of quality is stronger than accessibility in all four types of information sources. The effect of intention towards actual use is validated in all four types of sources; while the effect of facilitating conditions towards actual use is validated in personal-internal source. For the extended model: Task characteristics are composed with task complexity (including task analyzability, skill variety and task variety), task uncertainty and extrinsic task characteristics (including task autonomy, task importance and task emergency). Through empirical study on impersonal-external information sources, task complexity is validated to have moderating effect on the relationship between quality, accessibility and intention; task uncertainty is validated to have moderating effect on the relationship between accessibility and intention; extrinsic task characteristics is validated to have moderating effect on the relationship between quality and intention. Experience is validated to have moderating effect on the relationship between facilitating conditions and actual use of information sources.