Incorporating voice of the consumer: does it really work?
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570510606996 |
| Date | 01 August 2005 |
| Published date | 01 August 2005 |
| Pages | 769-785 |
| Author | Lung‐Far Hsieh,Shaw K. Chen |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
Incorporating voice of the
consumer: does it really work?
Lung-Far Hsieh
Department of Business Administration, Chung Yuan Christian University,
Chung Li, Taiwan, and
Shaw K. Chen
College of Business Administration, University of Rhode Island, Kingston,
Rhode Island, USA
Abstract
Purpose – This study attempts to address the question of whether and how new product
development (NPD) performance can be enhanced by interacting with users at specific stages in the
process and whether performance can be affected by user knowledge management.
Design/methodology/approach – In this study, data were collected from firms in the software
industry in Taiwan and a model of knowledge management capabilities was adopted to analyze the
effectiveness of a firm’s user knowledge.
Findings – The findings demonstrate that user interaction during NPD stages significantly
promotes new product performance in the early stages and that user knowledge management
competence has a positive effect on NPD performance – especially through the process capability
dimension.
Originality/value – Drawing from the findings of this paper, further research directions and
theoretical and managerial implications are projected.
Keywords Management activities, Process analysis, Product development, Taiwan
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Within the new product development (NPD) literature, utilization of user feedback has
been identified as a critical factor influencing new product success (Cooper and
Kleinschmidt, 1990). The information on customer needs and user experiences can be
viewed as resources that companies depend on for new product development (Gruner
and Homburg, 2000), so user interaction in NPD appears to be a logical answer to a
firm’s quest for better understanding customers’ needs (Campbell and Cooper, 1999). It
makes an access to developmental capabilities and other resources that the firm lacks
in-house (Athaide et al., 1996), as Cooper (1999) asserted that “build in the voice of the
customer” has become a critical success factor in NPD.
Nevertheless, user interaction involved in NPD has some disadvantages. For
instance, it may raise the NPD cost because user partnering requires a huge investment
in managerial time and resources (Schrader and Gopfert, 1998). Some empirical studies
also reported the disappointing performance impacts resulted from involving
customers in NPD processes (e.g. Clegg et al., 1996; Campbell and Cooper, 1999).
Therefore, this inconsistency of empirical results from customer NPD interaction
requires more detailed studies into user interaction in NPD process.
Though some scholars (Salomo et al., 2003) also advocate incorporating users
throughout entire NPD process, differential benefits accrue due to incorporating use r
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Incorporating
voice of the
consumer
769
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 105 No. 6, 2005
pp. 769-785
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/02635570510606996
involvement in different stages of the process (Song et al., 1998). Therefore, an
adequate arrangement regarding the intensity of user interaction in each NPD stage
may be more beneficial to the cost efficiency of NPD performance. In this study, we
adopted a five-stage model of NPD process to manifest different intensity of users’
involvement in each stage.
From the viewpoint of knowledge-based theory of firms, a full scope of knowledge
management encompa sses knowledge acquis ition, knowledge int egration, and
knowledge application (Aranda and Molina-Ferna
´ndez, 2002). Hence, in order to
realize the full advantages from user knowledge, firms need to have in place effective
knowledge management systems (Soliman and Youssef, 2003). In the organizational
behavior literature, the effectiveness of these knowledge management systems is
described broadly as “capabilities” (Gold et al., 2001). In this study, we adopted Gold
et al.’s (2001) model of knowledge management capabilities and analyzed the
effectiveness of a firm’s user knowledge management systems by evaluating these
knowledge management capabilities.
This study attempts to fill the current theoretic gap by addressing the following
questions:
.whether and how NPD performance can be enhanced by interacting with users at
specific stages in the new product development process; and
.whether and how NPD performance can be affected by user knowledge
management.
The next section deals with the conceptual framework that leads to the development
of the hypotheses tested in this research. The third section illustrates the research
methodology in which structural equation modeling is used as the analytical tool for
testing the statistical assumptions and estimating the measurement and structural
equation models. The fourth section discusses empirical results obtained from a
survey on 167 software firms in Taiwan. Finally, a brief conclusion and future
research suggestions are made relating to the managerial and theoretical aspects of
this study.
2. Literature review and hypotheses
2.1 User interaction and new product performance
Incorporating market intelligence into new product development process has been
recognized as an important antecedent to new product performance both in marketing
and NPD literature (Kahn, 2001). Conventionally, information regarding customer was
generated through market research activities, and it was infused into an NPD project
typically implemented by a cross-functional team. But this traditional approach was
reported less sufficiently when comparing with the approach that directly integrates
customers into NPD projects (Salomo et al., 2003) because the latter can reduce the bias
stemming from transferring users’ “sticky local information” (von Hippel, 1998) from
users to product designers during the trial-and-error cycles in the NPD process.
Therefore, direct interactions with users lead to rich content and help explain why
customers do what they do (Garcı
´a-Murillo and Annabi, 2002). Without user
participation in the NPD process, a new product can only be tested in a real world
setting after the design has been completed. Under such circumstances, the NPD may
become inefficient and costly.
IMDS
105,6
770
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