Research On The Influence Mechanism Of User Participation On Firm's NPD Performance

In the era of economic globalization,the rapid change of demand and technology and the fierce market competition make innovation the only choice for the survival and development of firms.How to improve the firm‘s new product development(NPD)performance has become an unavoidable problem for firms.The traditional closed innovation model can‘t meet the needs of firm "time-based competition",Users‘ participation into a firm‘s innovation provides a firm a new venue to achieve higher NPD performance.However,the internal laws and external conditions that affect the firm‘s NPD effect in different modes have not been fully revealed.This paper tries to address this problem systematically.This study is based on a combination of theoretical research and empirical analysis,and in-depth discuss(1)the different impacts of different users‘ participation models on the NPD performance,(2)the impact on the organization coordination mechanism and the firm‘s NPD performance after users‘ participating in the process of firm innovation as a dynamic source of innovation outside the boundaries of firms,(3)the impact of environmental turbulence on the relationship between user participation and firm‘s NPD performance.Findings got as follows:(1)Generally,users‘ participation into a firm‘s innovation provides new sources to improve NPD performance,whatever which participating mode has been adopted.However,different users‘ participation modes influence on firms‘ NPD performance via different paths.(2)Users‘ participating into innovation as information provider has the strongest effect on NPD performance,contrasting to the modes of users‘ participation as co-developer and independent innovator.This finding highlights that the cost of users‘ participation as co-developer cannot be ignored.(3)Boundary-spanning coordination plays mediate role in the relationship between users‘ participation and NPD performance.Most of all,it is of great importance that the formal coordination,namely,cross-functional coordination plays a completely mediate role between users‘ participating into innovation as innovators and NPD performance,or the effect will be negative for the focal firm.(4)Environmental turbulence presents complex regulatory effects on the relationship between users‘ participation and NPD performance.Among them,market turbulence has a positive moderate effect on the relationship between information provider and NPD performance,but there is no significant moderate effect between co-developer and independent innovator and NPD performance.Technical turbulence negatively moderate the relationship between information provider and NPD performance,and positively moderate the relationship between co-developer and NPD performance,while there is no significant moderate effect between independent innovator and NPD performance.This means that collaborative developers may improve their ability to respond quickly to technological changes through continuous interactive learning.Competition intensity has no significant moderate effect on the relationship between user participation and NPD performance.At the end of the paper,we discuss the theoretical contribution,management significance,research limitations and future prospects of this research.