Bennett Chi Kin YIM
Prof. Bennett Chi Kin YIM
市场学
Stelux Professor in Marketing (宝光基金教授 (市场学))
Professor
Director of Undergraduate Admissions and International Student Exchange

3917 8343

KK 710

Publications
In search of public service excellence

Public services touch every aspect of the lives of people around the world. These millions of service users also have opinions, both good and bad, on the quality of the public services they access. But how often are they asked about these opinions? And do these opinions help create changes and improvements to the services?

Engaging Customer Cocreation in New Product Development Through Foreign Subsidiaries: Influences of Multinational Corporations’ Global Integration and Local Adaptation Mechanisms

Efforts to engage customers in cocreating new products have garnered much research attention from studies documenting customer cocreation’s (CC’s) positive impact on firm innovation and performance. Less research, however, has counterbalanced the bright side with the potential dark side of CC, especially as a strategy for multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in foreign markets. This study examines how MNC subsidiaries’ CC affects new product innovativeness and knowledge leakage to competitors. Adopting a broader agency perspective to recognize that subsidiaries often do not perform up to headquarters’ expectations due to both self-serving opportunism and honest incompetence, this study explores how CC effects are contingent on MNCs’ global management mechanisms. Using a dyadic managerial survey of 238 MNC subsidiaries, the authors find that MNCs can control knowledge leakage by implementing proper global integration and local adaptation mechanisms. However, CC may not improve new product innovativeness, except when the subsidiary has low local research-and-development staff influence. This study contributes to the CC literature by showing its benefits, challenges, and boundary conditions as a growing MNC innovation strategy.