دانلود رایگان مقاله دیدگاه های مدیریتی در مورد جمع آوری در فرایند توسعه محصول جدید

abstract

One way organizations have sought to improve the new product development (NPD) process is to leverage the wisdom of crowds by reaching out to different communities for product and service ideas. However, integrating crowdsourcing into NPD can be challenging for managers and executives managing the process. This exploratory, qualitative research provides internal perspectives from managers and executives at business to business (B2B) firms utilizing crowdsourcing during NPD. Their insights suggest that input gathered through online forums from internal crowds is typically used in the fuzzy-front end (FFE) of the NPD process, whereas externally generated ideas tend to be used more during the commercialization stage of development. Interestingly, in these data, crowdsourced ideas during NPD tended to result in product line extensions rather than new-to-the-world products. This result is due to operational barriers which include the absence of a formal process and infrastructure for crowdsourcing, lack of alignment between budgeting and project timelines with crowdsourcing efforts, and unclear responsibility for managing and validating crowdsourced ideas. In addition, online platforms that can be used for crowdsourcing (e.g., social media) may not be viewed as legitimate tools for idea generation. Therefore, crowdsourced ideas are still considered supplemental to more traditional market research.

6. Future directions and limitations

The results of the content analysis in this research suggest that internal crowds serve as both a source of new ideas and a test market for implementing these ideas. Managers simply have greater control of the community and the information obtained from the crowd through internal crowdsourcing. Future worked aimed at understanding the culture and management structures in organizations which effectively utilize employee ideas in this manner would be a worthy endeavor. The interviews with the managers and executives studied in this research also uncovered many challenges related to external crowdsourcing in B2B marketing, including data authentication, regulating community participants, and aligning operational processes to take advantage of the ideas generated through external community platforms. Research examining how organizations transform their operational and NPD processes to better incorporate externally crowdsourced ideas would be useful for marketing academics and practitioners to understand complementarities between traditional market research and crowdsourcing. This future work could be conducted as a field study. An already planned research effort will explore whether managers' perceptions of the value of crowdsourced and community information is correct. In other words, is the lack of trust on the part of managers justified? This research will compare and evaluate the ideas gathered from ‘the crowd’ to those gathered by more traditional market research approaches, such as 1 to 1 interviews and lead users. If indeed the crowd provides as much or more valuable information as other methods, managers might consider relying more on external feedback in the early stages of NPD. A possible limitation of this research is that four of the interviews were conducted at business units of one large firm. While this could be a limiting factor in interpreting the results, the fact that the themes and implications are consistent across size and type of company mitigate this possible effect. Crowdsourcing from external sources in the FFE is a challenge no matter what the size of B2B organization and whether or not it is a division of a larger firm.