Research and Development Innovation of Consumer Digital Participation – A Double Case Study from the Perspective of Collaborative Evolution between Enterprises and Consumers

Existing research in the business sector has given rise to different views on the relationship between customer participation and the innovation of products by enterprises. This paper examines the contribution of two forms of customer involvement to new product development (NPD) with a consideration of its challenges. This study identifies a firm's experimental learning approach as a condition that affects its ability to manage the challenges of continuous innovation and continuous innovation (CIS) and thus influences their effects on NPD outcomes; contrasting the conditional effects of CIS and CIC to understand how they work differently in influencing new product outcomes; and examining the potential substitutive relationship between CIS versus CIC versus a new product financial performance. The findings provide important implications for firms' decision-making regarding customer involvement in NPD. Overall, this study provides new empirically supported insights into the customer participation and customer knowledge on company product innovation performance, thus adding important results to literature, and thereby providing companies with practical implications on how they achieve the most effective results.