User Integration in New Product Development: Field Insights

The traditional new product development (NPD) process is vertically integrated within a company, resulting in internally developed products by professionals. However, it encounters difficulties to optimally capture all innovation-relevant knowledge, which is distributed also among external actors such as product end users. This paper investigates if the theoretically proposed positive effect of integrating users in NPD on new product success is supported by evidence from the field. The aim is to summarize existing field insights in a conceptual model outlining the paths of influence of user integration in NPD on subsequent new product performance. By reviewing the findings of empirical studies based exclusively on real-field data from various industries, I identify factors that can be assigned to three groups: (i) Stage of the NPD process in which users are integrated, (ii) User-level factors, and (iii) Innovation setting factors. I map the relationships between the different factors in a holistic framework that can serve as guidance for practitioners who consider involving users in their innovation process.