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| Customer Involvement, Ambidextrous Green Innovations and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Product Intelligence |
| Jia Tao1,2,Yan Rui1,Wang Yu3,Chen Qiujun1 |
| (1. School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China;2.Key Laboratory of Process Control & Efficiency Engineering, Ministry of Education, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China;3. School of E-Business and Logistics, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing 100048, China) |
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Abstract China's economy has shifted to the stage of high-quality development, where promoting green production and consumption is highly emphasized. Driven by digital and intelligent technologies, it has become the consensus of decision makers to take personalized customization as the mainstream of operation management. Accordingly, in order to meet customers' needs and catch up market consumption trends more accurately, firms tend to involve customers into green new product development (NPD). Meanwhile, with the help of digital collaboration platforms, customers have unleashed great potential in helping firms generate key R&D ideas. Therefore, customer involvement in green NPD is crucial for firms' sustainable development and can enhance firm performance.#br#However, the relationship between customer involvement and firm performance is found to be controversial in existing studies, which calls for further studies to unveil their intermediary processes and clarify the boundary conditions. For one thing, this study takes customer involvement as the driving factor of firm performance to meet the nuanced customization needs, and considers ambidextrous green innovations (exploitative green innovation and exploratory green innovation) as the internal mechanisms. Existing studies suggest that green innovation plays an important role in the relationship between customer involvement and firm performance. Some scholars classify green innovation into exploitative green innovation and exploratory green innovation, but they have not discussed the driving role of customer involvement, and there is also a lack of research on the impact of ambidextrous green innovations on firm performance. For another, considering the intelligent strategy that is generally integrated into firms' green NPD, this study takes product intelligence as a moderating variable to identify the dilemma of the lack of “middle-level knowledge” (i.e., the new knowledge of how products can adapt to various application scenarios) that appears in the transformation phase and results in the possible risks of customer involvement in green NPD. As one of the important elements of intelligent manufacturing, product intelligence is the key internal uncertainty that firms may encounter in digital transformation. However, the existing research on product intelligence is still in its infancy, most of which is qualitative research elaborating the concept and dimensions of product intelligence, and only a few empirical studies analyzing the impact of product intelligence on customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as its moderating role on the supplier involvement—firm performance link. The moderating effect of product intelligence in the process of customer involvement in green NPD is still uninvestigated. Therefore, this research focuses on the following two questions. (1) What is the relationship among customer involvement, ambidextrous green innovations and firm performance? (2) How does product intelligence influence the relationship between customer involvement and ambidextrous green innovations?#br#The hypotheses are verified by constructing the multiple linear regression model based on the data collected from 163 manufacturing firms in China. The empirical results show thatcustomer involvement into green NPD is positively associated with exploitative green innovation and exploratory green innovation; both exploitative green innovation and exploratory green innovation are positively related to firm performance; product intelligence weakens the relationships between customer involvement and ambidextrous green innovations.#br#Compared with the previous literature, the contributions of this paper are twofold. First,it introduces ambidextrous green innovations as the direct results of customer involvement in green NPD, and builds a theoretical framework with ambidextrous green innovations to meet differentiated customization needs and improve firm performance. In this respect, this study reveals the inner mechanisms between customer involvement and firm performance, while enriching the related research on customer involvement and ambidextrous green innovations. Second, different from previous literature, this paper analyzes the moderating effect of product intelligence on the relationship between customer involvement and ambidextrous green innovations, identifies the risks of customer involvement in green NPD and the dilemma of the lack of “middle-level knowledge” in the context of digital transformation, and fills the gap of empirical literature on customer involvement in the intelligent situation. #br#Meanwhile,regarding customer collaboration to execute green NPD activities in the context of product intelligence, this paper suggests to promote the construction and management of collaborative R&D-operation platforms, pay attention to the accumulation of middle-level knowledge, and attach importance to the cultivation of compound talents.#br#
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Received: 10 January 2022
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