| dc.description.abstract | Today’s market businesses are increasingly under pressure of continuing to develop innovative products and the updating speed of new product versions. Therefore, several firms started to use new product development (NPD) strategies to identify the most influential and marketable new product ideas, as a consequence enhances the consumers’ purchase intention. Traditionally, companies dominated the overall new product development model, and sold products designed by company designers. With the continuing progress and popularize of Internet and online communities, companies have the ability to contact with consumers’ ideas and needs anywhere in the world. Several companies started to empower their online community members participating the idea generation stage of new product development, trying to develop great new product concepts in a faster and more efficient way.
This study investigated the response by Taiwanese consumer via different firms’ empowerment strategies in NPD. The way company empowered their customer to create (design) in the new product development processes are found to affect consumers’ perceptions of innovation ability and customer orientation of such firms, and these effects ultimately affect consumers’ purchase intention. Additionally, this study measured the moderating effect of product complexity and consumers’ cultural orientation; the latter is divided into individualist or collectivist.
In this study, 193 questionnaires were conducted through experimental design combined with paper-based questionnaires, to conduct relevant research data analysis and hypotheses verification. The empirical results showed that, consumer exposure to the message of company empowering their customer to create (design) in NPD, would perceive the underlying firm as having greater innovation ability and more customer orientated. In addition, consumers’ perception of innovation ability and customer orientation to specific firm would positively affect their purchase intention. The study demonstrated that product complexity plays an important moderating role. The higher the product complexity is, customers’ perception of innovation ability for those firms empowering customers create new product ideas in NPD are lower. Based on research findings, this research proposed firms should consider the product’s features and combining purposes of empowerment strategies to the market, in order to develop appropriate empowerment strategies in NPD. | en_US |