Customers’ involvement into the different stages of new product development process

Nowadays, customers’ role become important in new product development (NPD) processes. Therefore companies try to remodel their business in order to meet customer needs and sustain their innovations up to date. Plenty of the previous research papers were focused on the overall process of customers’ involvement rather than on the identification of their involvement level. This research is based on the customer centered principles in the innovation processes and NPD. NPD processes stand as a core of product innovations and take more attention of the managers. Therefore, this dissertation proposes the framework of NPD that is based on the theoretical background and uses alternating approach of customers’ involvement into different stages of NPD. This framework and approach are supported by the systematic literature review analysis and case study analysis. Two opposite case studies are analyzed and both advantages and disadvantages of these cases are taken into consideration. Additionally, 43 authors’ research studies are taken to evaluate their conclusions on involvement of customers in each stage of NPD. Eventually, each NPD stage has different level of customers’ involvement as well as the appropriateness of involvement in each stage. Alternating involvement into different stages helps to utilize customers’ contribution more efficiently. Alternating involvement of customers was proved by the analysis, which means that customers bring the value and highly involved in early stages of product development, in design and prototyping and in post-selling customer services. It is also identified that current trends force producers involve customers into the production stage, while commercialization and market diffusion is the completely company’s in-house activity. R&D is the main knowledge sharing stage where involvement of all stakeholders brings the highest outcome. Therefore, customers’ involvement into this stage is moderate, while product design and prototyping more opened for the customers. Finally, each model has its own limitations, but they open the variety of areas for future research by focusing more on the industry, product or company