Managing the Co-creation of Innovation: The Influence of Team Regulatory Style and Reflexivity on Customer Idea Selection and Innovation Outcomes

The cocreation of new products with customers has been shown to be associated with higher new product quality, the development of products that more closely match customers' unmet needs, lower development costs, and faster speed-to-market (Hoyer, Chandy, Dorotic, Krafft, & Singh, 2010; O'Hern & Rindfleisch, 2010). However, little is known about the evaluation and selection process in the cocreation of innovation (Bayus, 2013). To be successful, product development teams must identify customer ideas that have the potential to both fulfill unmet market needs and be profitable for the firm. This dissertation looks at two cognitive factors related to team decision-making, a prevention or promotion regulatory focus (Higgins, 1998) and team reflexivity (West, 1996) , to examine what drives a development team's ability to accurately pick "winners" and "losers" from a pool of customer ideas for new products. Data is analyzed from a series of team-based lab experiments, as well as a virtual ethnographic analysis of video footage from a firm's evaluation and selection meetings for 186 cocreated product concepts. In addition to regulatory style and reflexivity, the moderating effect of customer expertise also analyzed to further explore development team decision-making in the cocreation of innovation.