Do Social Media Tools Impact the Development Phase? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collaboratively design, manage, and launch new products and services. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what influence these new IT tools have on NPD performance. Through a project-level, exploratory, empirical study, the impact of these new IT tools on the development phase of the NPD process is investigated. We find that the use of these new tools is significantly lower than the adoption of traditional IT tools such as e-mail and computeraided-design. Traditional tools have a significant, positive impact on NPD outcomes, including team collaboration, the concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Interestingly, new media tools such as project wikis and shared collaboration spaces also have a significant, positive impact on concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Surprisingly, social networking tools like weblogs and Twitter negatively impact management evaluation while having no impact on NPD team collaboration and concepts/prototypes generated. These results suggest that social networking tools in their current guise are not helpful to the NPD team and may in fact be distracting to innovation management during the development phase.

The Effect of Team Affective Tone on Team Performance: The Roles of Team Identification and Team Cooperation

“…In fact, teamwork and collaboration are defined similarly in previous literature as a group's process for enabling members to easily work together. For example, while some studies define teamwork as the process of working collaboratively with a group of people (e.g., Justus, ; Kvarnström, ; Salas, Stagl, Burke, & Goodwin, ; Sedibe, ; Singh, Sharma, & Garg, ; Tarricone & Luca, ; Williams & Laungani, ), others define collaboration as the group's process of building and maintaining a shared conception of a problem or task (Brézillon & Naveiro, ; Connolly, Jones, & Jones, ; Marion, Barczak, & Hultink, ; Srikanth & Jarke, ; Van den Bossche, Gijselaers, Segers, & Kirschner, ).…”

Information Technology Tools in New Product Development: The Impact of Complementary Resources*,†

“…Similarly, task‐oriented IT tools, such as online customer needs surveys and product design tools, have been shown to be positively related to various NPD outcomes (Durmuşoğlu and Barczak, ; Marion, Barczak, and Hultink, Forthcoming). Online customer needs surveys can help firms identify opportunities for new products.…”

Sustainability, Social Media Driven Open Innovation, and New Product Development Performance*

“…Not surprisingly, leading NPD scholars (e.g., Slotegraaf, , p. 350) have called for more research to investigate sustainability and open innovation in concert because “these two shifts in business practice may be synergistic, with firms pursuing environmentally sustainable innovation through open innovation.” In particular, the utilization of social media technologies (e.g., blogs, discussion forums, innovation hubs) constitutes a widely used and powerful means of inbound open innovation activities, enabling a firm to effectively acquire and leverage external knowledge (Mount and Martinez, ; West and Bogers, ). Social media driven open innovation (SMOI) in the form of online channels such as innovation hubs are growing rapidly due to its touted potential to harness diverse knowledge and foster innovation among a wider network of users and partners (Mount and Martinez, ), yet there is limited understanding as to how these activities affect NPD (Marion, Barzcak, and Hultink, ). This paper, therefore, explores the potential synergistic effects of a firm's sustainability orientation (SO) and social media driven open innovation on its NPD outcomes.…”