Configurational Paths to Generating Knowledge Benefit through Customer Participation

Involving customers in the new product development process has been found to create knowledge benefit for the firm. However, the different roads leading to a firm’s knowledge benefit through configurations of which new product development stage customers are engaged in, a firm’s internal co-creation-related capabilities, and the external environment have yet to be specified. To explore the alternative configurational paths to generating knowledge benefit through customer participation, a state-of-the-art fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is applied to a sample of 181 new product development projects. The results reveal six different configurations to generate knowledge benefit in the new product development process and yield useful suggestions for obtaining knowledge benefit through customer participation.