Participatory New Product Development–A Framework for Deliberately Collaborative and Continuous Innovation Design

Abstract Participation of all relevant stakeholders to the New Product Development (NPD) process is an important issue for the democratization of the use of goods and services and promoting responsible research and innovation. Although participatory NPD is becoming a hot topic in recent years, most of the studies concentrate on the participation of users as individual entities-customers and neglect that production-consumption cycle is constituted as a network of stakeholders. Besides their role as customers, individuals play different social roles in their daily lives. Social roles are not determined according to some essential behavioural characteristics but emerge within a structure constituted as a network amalgamated according to a set of relations. Individuals can have different norms depending on their position in the network structures constituted according to different types of stakes. Organizing and coordinating stake based roles is a complex and fuzzy issue as these are constantly in making and involves “politics” in the sense of persuading other people to some form of action. In this paper, we have discussed the possibility of an integrative online platform built upon the principles of Web 2.0 revolution that would act as a “democratic assembly” for negotiating, coordinating and integrating the fuzzy cycles of the innovation process. Social media offers great opportunities for organizing and coordinating participatory NPD activities as they provide means for bringing large number of participants to form a virtual community within an electronic platform. Building upon these principles we have outlined some important challenges that can be important during the conceptualization of such a platform. Our conceptual framework can offer a guideline for future research with the aim of turning this concept into a product. This paper has some limitations which could be complemented with some empirical research on how actors experience these challenges in their everyday organizational context. Future work needs to be focused on discovering the concerns from the emic view points of the stakeholders.

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