Study On The Mechanism Of The Effect Of Supplier And Customer Involvement To Enterprise New Product Development

The process of new product development(NPD)is the pillar of existence and development for manufacturing enterprises,which help enterprises to obtain sustainable competitive advantages.However,due to the restriction of their limited resource and capability,it is difficult for firms to solve all of the challenges in NPD process.Development of new products can no longer be accomplished by a single firm,and there is a need for firms to look outside their organisations for opportunities to create value jointly with partners.Against that,more and more firms involve their customers and suppliers into NPD process to improve new products performance.Despite the increasing research interests in external involvement,findings about the relationships between two dimentions of external involvement and performance from previous studies are inconsistent.While some studies provided empirical evidence for the positive impact of external involvement on performance,others reported a nonsignificant or even negative relationship.Efforts to simplify and clarify this conflicting is necessary for firms that intend to implement external involvement,and firms are urging to find answers to the following questions.Customer and supplier involvement are viewed as the important source of innovation,does they really contribute to NPD performance improvements? How does external involvement exert effects on performance outcomes? What the roles of situational factors or antecedents that impact external involvement effectiveness? The existing empirical research has not yet reached a consensus on the relationship between external involvement and NPD performance.Due to the existence of these inconsistencies,firms are reluctant to implement customer and supplier involvement.In this dissertation,we try to clarify and explain the inconsistent findings.By empirically investigating the relationship between external involvement and NPD performance,we reveal the concrete mechanisms of how external involvement impacts on performance and further analysis the influences of situational factors that cause different performance outcomes.These findings have important implications for research and practice in both the external involvement and the NPD areas.Combined by innovation theory,this dissertation applies the method of literature survey,questionnaire research and statistical analysis to investigate how external involvement influence NPD performance systematically.The main works of this dissertation are summarized as follows:(1)On the basis of a comprehensive review and introduction with focus of the academic literatures concerning the external involvement,customer orientation and NPD performance,we summarize the main contributions and shortages of previous research.Then we propose the basic questions of this study and elaborate on the importance of these questions.(2)We conduct a moderated-mediation analysis to uncover the way of how customer and supplier involvement are related to new product market performance,and highlights the importance of IT implementation in absorbing and exploiting external resources.(3)Combing insights from the knowledge-based view(KBV)and competing values framework(CVF),we consider the cultural factors that affect the effectiveness of external involvement.Moreover,we investigate the moderating role of multiple dimensions of organizational culture between external involvement and new product development performance.(4)Based on the findings of survey results and research conclusions,we further investigate the effects of customer orientation.We analyze the impacts of different dimensions of customer involvement on NPD performance and investigate the moderating roles of top management support.