How Companies Can Modify R&D for Integrating Social Media Activities into the New Products Development

Through past decade open innovation achieved enormous amount of attention from scholars and practitioners as well. We took one part of open innovation – customer innovation through social media, and looked into companies‟ practices to more efficiently integrate information from social media into New Product Development (NPD). We used mechanism of coordination method to explore how moving from traditional product development to open one, affects changes in R&D. We found three types of changes, that affects product development related processes, and four important factors to which companies are paying attention while integrating social media into NPD process: (1) frequent interaction with customers, (2) open information flow, (3) building a unit for coordinating activities, and (4) dividing R&D into units for tackling with ideation, concept development, and actual product building separately.