Customer-Supplier Interactions in Crowdsourcing Practices : Customer Participation on Creating and Sharing of New Product Value

Crowdsourcing communities' participation revolves around customers throughout all steps of creating ideas and product value. Firms across manufacturing industries and suppliers have started to interact with customers/users to understand their knowledge, creative ideas and influence. However, little research exists that looks at the interactions between customers and networking suppliers through crowdsourcing to know how product value is created. Using institutional arrangement perspective to develop an end to end model, we tested model empirically based on sample of 185 manufacturers of construction safety equipment, electronic and optics, metal and metal working, and rubber and plastic products industries.The results show that customer participation affects product value and ideas creation by improving effectiveness of the new designed product development process by enhancing ideas sharing and customer-supplier interactions. Concerning product development process, customer resources investments are enhanced by increasing the soundness of the customer participation process.Our findings contribute to a better understanding of customer participation on the customers' share of new ideas and product value contribution part which is based on the dependence and equity perspective. Finally, we propose several suggestions for the distribution of knowledge sharing and product value to ensure the distribution of value is fair