Abstract: In the era of open innovation, it becomes an important strategy for a firm to involve users participating into its course of new product development. However, user involvement can introduce management complexity that may lead to innovation failure, and the effectiveness of user participation in innovation can be unpredictable due to issues of whether the manner of user involvement matches the external environment. Accordingly, based on knowledge-based view and contingency theory, and from a firm’s perspective, the impact of user participation on the new product development (NPD) performance and the contingency effect of environmental turbulence was investigatesd.Using data from 444 domestic firms, hierarchical regression analysis was employed to explore how different modes of user involvement align with various dimensions of uncertain environments, thereby effectively enhancing the NPD performance of enterprises. The results find that user participation as information provider and co-developer is conducive to improving the company’s NPD performance. However, user participation in its solitary manner has no relationship with the firm’s NPD performance significantly. Different dimensions of environmental uncertainty have different effects on relationship between user participation and NPD performance. Specifically, market turbulence negatively moderates the relationship between user participation in solitary manner and NPD performance, and technology turbulence positively moderates the relationship between co-developers and NPD performance, and competitive intensity positively moderates the relationship between information providers and NPD performance. Thus, it is evident that enterprises need to make situational decisions to adopt appropriate forms of user involvement based on the characteristics of their environment, thereby improving NPD performance.