| The importance of innovation and new product development (NPD) is widely recognized by marketing scholars and practitioners. Traditionally, marketers have assumed that NPD is a closely-guarded process that is largely led by the firm. In recent years, however, companies such as IBM, Procter & Gamble, and Google have taken an alternative approach by launching initiatives designed to directly tap the creative power of their customers. Recognizing this emerging trend, the Marketing Science Institute has identified customer co-creation as one of its key research priorities for 2008--10. My dissertation seeks to answer this call by examining customer co-creation in the context of open NPD teams.;To date, the extant innovation literature assumes that NPD activities typically take place in teams largely comprised of members of a firm. However, open NPD teams are organized in a very different manner. Specifically, open NPD teams differ from traditional NPD teams on two central dimensions: (1) open membership structures that grant team members the power to enter and leave a team as they wish and (2) open access to the project core team that encourages users to contribute to NPD in a variety of ways. As the constraints on team composition and end-user contribution are much lower in these teams than they are in traditional NPD teams, I employ the term "open NPD teams" to define this phenomenon. Drawing on insights from a variety of theoretical perspectives including organizational learning, network theory, the knowledge-based view, and quality signaling theory, my conceptual framework examines the influence of various facets of open NPD team composition and end-user contributions on two key types of NPD performance (i.e., new product release activity and market response). Thus, this dissertation provides insights on four substantive research questions: (1) Which types of end-user contributions contribute most to open NPD team performance? (2) What is the relative effect of team composition and end-user contribution on NPD performance? (3) How much control must managers cede in order to reap the benefits offered by open NPD teams? and (4) What are the possible limitations in involving end-users in the NPD process?... |
