Research On The Impact Of Customer Participation On The Innovation Performance Of Knowledge - Intensive Service Industry

Along with the arrival of knowledge-based economy, Knowledge-Intensive Business Services becomes an important source of national and regional competitive advantage for its forward-looking, leading and driving role. The research of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services becomes a hot topic in international management science. Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS for short) are those companies or organizations which depend significantly on the professional knowledge of specific field and provide customers and society intermediate goods and services on the basis of knowledge. High degree of innovation is one of major characteristics of KIBS, and KIBS sustains competitive advantage by innovation. Therefore, much attention has been paid to the innovation of KIBS. Meanwhile, customer becomes the subject of value creation with globalization, networking and the relaxation of rules and regulations. Customer becomes the subject of value creation. More and more scholars domestic and abroad are paying attention to customer involvement in service innovation.The thesis focuses on KIBS and how customer involvement promotes KIBS innovation performance. The research is carried out basing on service innovation theory, organizational learning theory, knowledge management theory and cooperation innovation theory. The research methods include literature analysis and interviews, normative research and empirical research, and qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis. The thesis discusses the essential characteristics of KIBS innovation systematically, designs related scales of customer participation in KIBS innovation, and reveals the influence mechanism and acting mechanism of customer participating on KIBS innovation performance according to literature review-theoretical analysis-model building-empirical test-practical enlightenments. Based on the theoretical research and empirical analysis of issues concerning about customer participating KIBS innovation, the thesis has made several innovative results which are listed below:(1) The theoretical framework of customer involvement influencing KIBS innovation performance is proposed. The thesis brings organizational learning and knowledge sharing into customer participating KIBS innovation model and constructs the structural equation model of customer participation, organizational learning, knowledge sharing and KIBS innovation performance. Furthermore, the thesis reveals the path and acting mechanism of customer participation affecting knowledge sharing through organizational learning and thus influences the performance of KIBS innovation. The existing research of customers participating KIBS innovation’s mediating mechanism is supplemented and improved.(2) It is proposed organizational learning plays intermediaries part between customer participation and KIBS innovation performance, subdives organizational learning’s intermediarie role, and organizational learning plays a different degree between customer participation and sharing knowledge. The existing research mainly reveals the mediation mechanism of knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing between customer participation in service innovation and its performance, ignoring the important role of organizational learning. The thesis proposes customer involvement promotes knowledge sharing through organizational learning, and then promotes KIBS innovation performance. Moreover, organizational learning plays partial mediating role in information provision as well as co-production and knowledge sharing, and full mediating role in trust as well as personal interaction and knowledge sharing.(3) The study introduces customer trust as a regulated variable to investigate the influence of customer participation and KIBS innovation on the contingency effect of organization sharing and knowledge sharing. Customer trust is the basic of long-term relationship, and the key factor in relationship commitment. The reported research concerning customer trust places emphasis on customer relationship, whereas the customer trust was catalogued to the process of KIBS innovation. The investigation on the regulation effect of customer trust on KIBS innovation activity is rare. It is revealed by empirical study that customer trust does facilitate the impact of customer trust on organization learning and knowledge commons. In details, a higher degree of cognition trust results in more evident positive influence of information providing/interpersonal interaction on organizational learning; a higher degree of affect trust leads to more evident positive influence of information providing/cooperative production/interpersonal interaction on organizational learning and positive influence of information providing/cooperative production on knowledge sharing.