Research On The Influence Of Leading Customer Online Participation On New Product Development Performance

With the advent of the era of knowledge economy,more and more enterprises are gradually moving from closed innovation to open innovation,the role of the customer is transferred from the passive product recipient to the product value co-creator,customer participation in new product development is becoming more and more popular.And the development of Internet technology,changing form of customer participation form offline to online,which not only reduces the cost of participation,but also improves the efficiency of participation.And leading customers as the most valuable customers to new product development,their online participation in new product development activities has great significance to improve the new product development performance.In addition,the impact of knowledge creation on new product development has been a concern,but whether the leading customer online participation in the process of enterprise new product development could achieve knowledge co-creation,and through knowledge co-creation affect new product development performance,which are worthy of study.Therefore,based on these practical problems,this paper takes knowledge co-creation as mediator variables,and studies the influence mechanism of leading customer online participation on new product development performance,in order to provide theoretical and practical guidance for enterprises.On the basis of the literature review,this paper divides the leading customer online participation into three dimensions:information providing,co-developing and independent conceiving,knowledge co-creation into mining knowledge co-creation and exploratory knowledge co-creation,new product development performance into time performance and innovation performance.Theoretical model and theoretical hypothesis are built based on those definitions.This article applied the questionnaire survey,in which 232 valid questionnaires were collected,and using statistical analysis software SPSS19.0 and LISREL8.70 to process the sample data,then verified the hypothesis,and obtained the influence mechanism among each variables.The results of empirical study show that:(1)The measurement scale of each variable has good reliability and validity,that is,the dimension of each variable is reasonable;(2)Each dimension of leading customer online participation has a significant positive impact on the time performance and innovation performance of new product development;(3)Each dimension of leading customer online participation has a significant positive impact on the mining knowledge co-creation and exploratory knowledge co-creation;(4)Mining knowledge co-creation has a significant positive impact on the new product development's time performance and innovation performance,but exploratory knowledge co-creation has a significan positive impact on its innovation performance and has no significant impact on its time performance;(5)Mining knowledge co-creation plays a mediating role when each dimension of leading customer online participation affects the new product development's time performance and innovation performance,while exploratory knowledge co-creation plays a mediating role when each dimension of leading customer online participation affects the new product development's innovation performance,but doesn't intermediate the relations between leading customer online participation and time performance of new product development.Based on the empirical results,this study provides recommendations for enterprises to attract leading customers to participate on line and improve their ability to co-create knowledge.