Customer involvement in the new process innovation: antecedents, mediation and performance
European Journal of Innovation Management
ISSN: 1460-1060
Article publication date: 29 April 2021
Issue publication date: 23 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The paper proposes customer involvement can be considered an organization-level construct of knowledge creation in the new process development. Specifically, the paper evaluates three distinct organizational practices as knowledge antecedents – competitor orientation, social network and internal coordination – that can facilitate the adoption of customer involvement in the process innovation development.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper empirically tests this theory for 2,000 firms that are stratification sampled from a population of 33,844 Taiwanese firms, and a data set of 170 valid questionnaires is collected. The questionnaire was mainly modified from a Kim and Kim (2010) measure which was designed based on the 3rd edition of the Oslo Manual OECD/Eurostat 2005. The concept of customer involvement in new service development proposed by Alam (2002) was also applied to the questionnaire.
Findings
(1) The antecedents of customer involvement, which include competitor orientation, external social networks and internal coordination, function as a determinant to nourish customer involvement. (2) Customer involvement significantly positively mediates the relationship between knowledge antecedents and new process performance. (3) Customer involvement is a crucial knowledge creation for improving the new process innovation performance in manufacturing firms.
Originality/value
Two basic tenets of theory building serve as the foundation of the model in this paper. First, research on customer involvement is augmented by showing that customer involvement can emerge as a shared perception among organizational members that is distinct from individual-level involvement. Moreover, customer involvement in process innovation can help firms manage their knowledge and further enhance firm performance. Second, the knowledge management model provides a key lens through which researchers can take a process-oriented view that focuses on customer involvement as a unique capability that firms can develop in process innovation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this paper. The author of Mr. Jian-Hang Wang would like to thank Professor Ian Miles from the University of Manchester for extensive feedback on an earlier version of this paper when Mr. Wang was a visiting scholar at University of Manchester. The authors are also grateful for the financial support from Military of Science & Technology, Taiwan (Project No: 108-2410-H-035-036), and National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
Citation
Chang, Y.-C., Chiu, W.-H., Wang, J.-H. and Teng, M.-J. (2022), "Customer involvement in the new process innovation: antecedents, mediation and performance", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 1115-1141. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-09-2019-0268
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited