Research On Influence Of Charateristics Of Virtual Customer Environment On Customer Participation In New Product Development

The development of Informantion Technology and the spread of Internet have provided new technical support for customers to participate in New Product Development(NPD)activities.More and more enterprises have involoved customers that geographically dispersed deeply and widely in NPD activities through enterprises' website,virtual customer community,innovation toolkits and so on.The academics have also paid more attention to the studies in online customers' participation in NPD.Virtual Customer Environments(VCE)are online platforms that built and operated by enterprises for customers to participate in innovation and value creation.The characteristics of VCE would impact customer participation in NPD.There are both theoretical significance and practical utility in studying the relationship between characteristics of VCE and customer participation in NPD.This research based on the NPD in VCE that built by enterprises,explored the relationships between interactivity,sociability,ease of use,user perceived control of VCE and customer participation,and the mediating effect of customer experience,the moderating role of customer knowledge.This research gives a review of studies about customer participation,characteristics of VCE,customer experience and customer knowledge,then determines the key problems,builds the theoretical model and then propose hypothesis.The participation in developments of mobile phones and related products in virtual community is selected as the background of empirical study.Through the data collection and analysis,empirical test is launched and testing of hypotheses has been done.The results of this research as follows,first,the interactivity,sociability,ease of use and user perceived control of VCE have positive influence on customer participation in NPD.Second,customer experience plays a partly mediating role between interactivity,sociability,ease of use and customer participation,plays a completely role between user perceived control and customer participation.Third,customer knowledge plays a moderating role in the relationship between interactivity,sociability,user perceived control and customer participation.In the same level of characteristics of VCE,the impact of interactivity,sociability,user perceived control on participation of high knowledge customers are more significant than those on low knowledge customers.The moderating role of customer knowledge on the relationship between ease of use and customers' participation is not significant.