earticle

영어

Productivity of product development process is very important to competitiveness of companies. Product development literature presents two counter approaches of developing products to meet customers’ needs. One approach to develop products to meet customers’ needs is to let customers transfer the information about what they need to manufacturers voluntarily through virtual community. This study aims to explore the reason why customers participate in product development process ‘voluntarily’ through virtual communities. In this study, we investigate why customers participate in product development process voluntarily in virtual communities. Based on confirmatory measurement model, we show that product attribute information and consumer experience information have statistically significant effects on customer participation through self-efficacy in virtual communities. And we suggest some implications to the marketing researcher and managers by discovering knowledge about how to improve customer participation in product development process.