Inflow and outflow knowledge/communication strategies in open innovation: essays from new product development and consumer engagement perspectives

This Dissertation is intended to examine how marketing managers can utilize the inflow and outflow of knowledge/communication to improve project and firm performance metrics under the open innovation paradigm. The dissertation shows the applicability of the NPD and consumer engagement perspectives to a range of strategic issues, such as management of network and knowledge assets in community-based NPD, management of inflow and outflow openness under team diversity, and utilization of social media marketing and traditional marketing such as advertising to increase new product sales. First, this dissertation reveals that for inflow knowledge management, it is important to take an integrative approach to align knowledge and network assets in open innovation. The results show that network depth-knowledge breadth and network breadth-knowledge depth combinations are optimal for open innovation success, but network breadth-knowledge breadth or network depth-knowledge depth combinations are suboptimal. Contrary to the traditional wisdom, more network or knowledge assets in open innovation do not necessarily lead to better success. Second, this dissertation examines both the inflow and outflow of knowledge and proposes an integrative theoretical model to study the configuration of inflow and outflow openness. The results suggest that just having a wide array of connection from inflow openness does not guarantee development success. It also needs to consider the dimension of performance and team structure. Third, this dissertation investigates the interplay of two major marketing tools of traditional advertising and social media activities on consumer engagement. It differentiates Consumer-to-Brand and Consumer-to-Consumer engagement and suggests that traditional advertising play different mechanisms to enhance or reduce the effectiveness of social media activities on Consumer-to-Brand and Consumer-to-Consumer engagement, and ultimately on new product sales