A Study of Relationship Between User Participation and Firm’s NPD Performance under Conditions of Environmental Uncertainty

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, 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 and hierarchical regression model, how different modes of user involvement align with various dimensions of uncertain environments was explored, thereby effectively enhancing the new product development performance of enterprises. The results find that the participation of users as information providers and co-developers is conducive to improving the NPD performance, while user participation in its solitary manner has no relationship with the firm’s new product development performance significantly. Different dimension of environmental uncertainty has different effect on relationships between different ways of user participation and new product development 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 based on the characteristics of their environment to adopt appropriate forms of user involvement, thereby improving new product development performance.