مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد دیدگاه های مدیریتی در مورد جمع آوری (الزویر)

New products are key contributors to organizational growth, especially in the business-to-business (B2B) sector where they account for over 30% of B2B firms’ annual sales and profits (Markham & Lee, 2013). In spite of this contribution to corporate success, new product failure rates remain high, averaging 40% (Markham & Lee, 2013). Therefore, organizations continue to search for ways to improve their NPD profi- ciency to ensure continued survival and growth (e.g., Pitta & Pitta, 2012). One way managers try to increase NPD success is to improve idea generation in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of the development cycle. The reason for this focus on the FFE is that improvements in the early stage of development can generate higher profits faster than in later stages (Koen et al., 2002; Stevens, Burley, & Divine, 1999). This result occurs because idea generation often has more profit impact than improvement in commercialization and launch. Therefore, with knowledge of this impact, organizations have long sought to incorporate customer insights into the front end of NPD, using techniques including the Lead User Method (Herstatt & Hippel, 1992), one-on-one interviews (Griffin & Hauser, 1993), traditional market research, and other techniques such as conjoint analysis (Green & Srinivasan, 1990). Yet another mechanism to gather ideas in the FFE is crowdsourcing. The term crowdsourcing refers to the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or specific team and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call (Howe, 2008). The goal of the process is to improve the overall quality/ quantity of ideas obtained or the task performed. In the business context, crowds can be comprised of internal (employees) or external (lead users and customers) members. In new product development, crowdsourcing has been utilized as an operational innovation to enhance firms’ new product development, extending the development process beyond its traditional organizational boundaries (Laursen & Salter, 2006; Wang, Hsiao, Yang, & Hajli, 2016). Managers may decide to involve customers in designing new products when the products are perceived to be difficult to use in order to gain consumers’ perspectives early in the development process (Allen, Chandrasekaran, & Basuroy, 2016). Incorporating more feedback into NPD may also lead to innovative, new-to-the-world products. The trend towards crowdsourcing has occurred in part because advances in technology have made it possible to gather ideas through online communities quickly and efficiently (Howe, 2006; Simula, Töllinen, & Karjaluoto, 2013) versus traditional methods of focus groups, meetings, and other forums. Yet, despite the potential to generate creative and novel ideas, the use of crowdsourcing in the NPD process is still relatively new for most organizations. Managers are likely to encounter both advantages and challenges in adapting an existing NPD process to include crowdsourcing. Challenges may include designing an effective method for identifying good quality ideas and then incorporating these ideas in to the process.