Impact of Social Media applications on NPD process: An Exploratory Study

Over the last few years, firms have deployed information technology applications to improve their new product development (NPD) processes. Recently, firms have been using social media applications and /or tools incorporated with social networking features that enable the internal and external users of an organization to directly communicate and collaborate in the NPD idea generation, design and launching. However, it is not clear in the literature as to what extent social media applications or tools impact on NPD processes. Therefore, by adopting an exploratory approach this study has investigated the impact of social media applications on the development phases of NPD processes. We find that social media applications such as Facebook, Google analytics or consumer discussion forums are in use in large firms but in a very limited scale. These applications have little impact on NPD processes particularly in idea generation and management decisions. Interestingly, social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and social networking blogs are not regarded as a medium to obtain the ideas for NPD processes. Surprisingly, these applications have been found to have both positive and no impact on management decisions on NPD processes. These results suggest that social media applications are in use in large firms but they are not considered to be significant channel of information that can contribute into NPD processes.