| With the continuous development of economy, the experience economy era iscoming gradually, and role of customers has been changing unceasingly which transitsfrom passive recipients of products to the co-creators of products value gradually.Customers’ involvement in innovation activities of enterprises has become anincreasingly common phenomenon. The appearance of network innovationcommunity supports some convenient conditions for customer involvement whichmeans that customers can put forward their new plans or new ideas according toproblems in innovation in enterprises. In such a brand new technological environment,what mostly matters is increasing the creative output of customer involvement in theprocess of it. Therefore, how to exploit and utilize customers’ creative potentialitieseffectively in network innovation community, and how to implement management incustomers’ involvement in order to enhance the creative output of their new productshave aroused broad interests from business and academia.This paper takes customer involvement in network innovation community as apoint of penetration. On a basis of theories such as open innovation, customerinvolvement innovation and innovation management, it explores effects of the aims ofcustomer involvement in network innovation community (economic interests need,cognitive need and self-worth need) and the degree of customer involvement (thelevel of involvement and the hierarchy of involvement) on creative output of newproducts (quantity of innovation and quality of it) in depth in combination withcharacters of the network community. At first, we build a theoretical model based onnormative analysis, and propose several research hypotheses. Then throughquestionnaire survey among customers in network innovation platform we conductempirical tests on hypotheses with statistic software SPSS21.0. Following are ourmainly conclusions: 1) The aims of customer involvement (economic interests need, cognitive needand self-worth need) has an obvious positive effect on the creative output of newproducts (quantity of innovation and quality of it), which indicates the stronger theaims of customer involvement are, the higher the creative output of new productsideas.2) The level of customer involvement has an obvious positive effect onquantity of innovation, but doesn’t influence quality of it so obviously. The hierarchyof customer involvement has a positive effect on quality obviously, but has noobvious effect upon quantity.3) Relationship management has a moderator effect on relationship betweenthe level of customer involvement and the creative output of new products. However,it has few such effects on relationship between the hierarchy of customer involvementand the creative output.This paper analyses the aims and degree of customer involvement in networkenvironment, and also enriches theories concerning innovation of customerinvolvement. The emergence and selection of innovation are important indevelopment of new products. Hence this paper also enriches vague advanced theorywhich studies the effects of customer involvement on creative output of new productsin network innovation community. As for Internet application, it can provide sometheoretical directions about how to guide and administrate the customer involvementbehaviors effectively in network innovation community, which consequentlyaccelerate customers’ creative output of new products and improve innovationperformance eventually. |
