Research On Mechanism Of Impact Of Customer Participation On New Service Development Performance:the Mediating Effects Of Organizational Learning

With service products in market are increasing, competition intensity is growing and demand change is speeding up, so it is difficult for the R&D capability of single enterprise to adapt to rapid changes of customer demand. Therefore, attracting customer participation becomes a strategic choice for many enterprises to obtain a high level of new service development performance. Due to continuous improvement of living standards and the choice of goods is increasing, customers are faced with more opportunities to choose them. So the fundamental change of customer role has taken place. They have become co-producers of products, co-creators of customer value and co-developers of enterprise ability from passive recipients. Since then, research on impact of customer participation on new service development performance has been attracting a great amount of intention by practitioners and scholars.While the academia and managers have recognized the importance of impact of customer participation on new service development performance, there is no systemic research on impact mechanism. So, based on previous research, selecting service enterprises in B2B context as object and applying normative analysis and empirical research methods, the paper systematically explores impact of different dimensions of customer participation on dimensions of new service development performance using organizational learning as mediating variable. Especially, it explores mediating effects of different dimensions of organizational learning between the relationships above, and it provides a new theoretical perspective and a more complete framework for research on the topic of customer participation based on organizational learning.The work of this paper mainly includes three aspects as follows:Firstly, it identifies dimensions of customer participation, organizational learning and new service development performance through literature research, deep surveys and interviews. Especially, it identifies the system of dimensions of customer participation from the perspective of intellectual capital. Secondly, it establishes a mechanism model about the relationship between dimensions of customer participation and implicit performance of new service development, and the mechanism of impact of dimensions of customer participation on dimensions of implicit performance of new service development using the mediating variable of organizational learning through literature review, theoretical deduction and enterprise interview. Thirdly, selecting customer participation in activities of new service development in B2B context as survey objects, the paper examines the above direct effects and mediating effects among relative variables through some statistical measurement methods such as descriptive statistics analysis, factor analysis, structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis using the software SPSS15.0and LISREL8.70to analyse data obtained by questionnaire survey. At last, the findings are discussed.Through the above work, the main conclusions are as follows:Firstly, customer participation, organizational learning and new service development performance are all multi-diemnsions concepts which can be connected organically. Customer participation is composed of three dimensions such as human customer participation, structure customer participation and relationship customer participation. Organizational learning includes transformative learning, exploratory learning and exploitative learning. New service development performance can be disaggregated into implicit performance and explicit performance. Implicit performance includes speed to market and innovative degree, and explicit performance is composed of market performance and competitive superiority. Secondly, there are different, significant and direct impacts of customer participation on implicit performance of new service development, and implicit performance of new service development on explicit performance. The positive impacts of human customer participation on speed to market, relationship customer participation on speed to market and innovative degree, speed to market on market performance and competitive superiority, innovative degree on market performance are all significant. Thirdly, through introducing organizational learning, it can form a more effective promotion mechanism of implicit performance of new service development based on customer participation. There are significantly partial mediating effects of transformative learning on the relationships between human customer participation and speed to market and innovative degree. Partial mediating effects of exploratory learning and exploitative learning on the relationships between human customer participation, structure customer participation and speed to market and innovative degree are also significant.The innovation of this paper includes three aspects:Firstly, research topic is innovative. Based on expanding theoretical findings, it not only makes a breakthrough about relevant research on customer participation in service delivery, but also deepens research on customer innovation and its performance impact, which lays the foundation or produces the theoretical reference value for the further empirical research. Secondly, research view is innovative. It systematically analyses the intrinsic mechanism of impact of customer participation on new service development performance through organizational learning. This broadens research perspective of the impact of customer participation on new service development performance and makes up the pity of the absence of empirical studies in this field. Thirdly, measurement system of variables is innovative. It establishes the dimension definition and measurement system of customer participation based on the perspective of intellectual capital and organizational learning, which adds a choice of definition method for research on customer participation and organizational learning and to some extent makes up for the lack of adequate definition methods on customer participation and organizational learning under Chinese cultural context.