The double-edged sword of customer participation on new product development performance: the contingent roles of relational and environmental factors
基于167家中国高科技企业数据，研究发现客户参与通过知识共享提升新产品开发绩效，但通过加剧客户-开发者冲突降低绩效；合作经验和技术动荡分别调节这些效应。
Although customer participation plays an increasingly important role in firm innovation, both its effects on new product development (NPD) performance in the B2B context and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear in the extant literature. Building on the boundary spanning theory, we investigate the double-edged effects of customer participation on NPD performance by explicating the mediating roles of knowledge sharing and customer – developer conflict. Based on a sample of 167 high-tech firms in China, our findings indicate that customer participation can improve NPD performance through knowledge sharing but decrease NPD performance by exacerbating the conflict between the developer firm and its customer. Furthermore, previous cooperation experience attenuates the effects of customer participation on knowledge sharing and customer – developer conflict, whereas technological turbulence strengthens the effect of customer participation on knowledge sharing. Our findings offer important implications for both innovation research and practice.