Social Software in New Product Development - State of Research and Future Research Directions

Product development becomes increasingly collaborative and knowledge-intensive in today’s industry. To gain competitive advantage an effective usage of information systems in new product development (NPD) is needed. Social software applications indicate further potential for usage in NPD, the so called “Product Development 2.0”, which is poorly understood in research so far. The purpose of this article is to point out the current state of research in this area by means of a literature review, after which research gaps and future research directions are identified. The results indicate that social software applications are suitable to support tasks in all phases of the NPD process, but influencing factors and effects of the identified social software usage in NPD are poorly understood so far.