CROWDSOURCING: A STRATEGY FOR FIRM PERFORMANCE IN THE PLASTIC MANUFACTURING SECTOR IN SOUTHEAST NIGERIA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51594/ijmer.v3i7.240Abstract
The heavy reliance of manufacturing firms in the south-eastern part of Nigeria on their team of experts in Research and Development (R & D), to come up with new ideas and innovation, and the neglect of the input of customers in this process necessitated this study to examine the nexus between crowdsourcing and firm performance in the plastic manufacturing sector in southeast Nigeria. The work was anchored on the Human Capital Theory. The study adopted a survey research design as the most suited for the work. Two states were selected judgmentally, because of the concentration of plastic manufacturing firms in those States. Eighteen plastic manufacturing firms were selected randomly, with a population strength of 328. The sample size was 176, arrived at using Krejcie and Morgan formula. Questionnaire was the instrument for data collection, and it was subjected to content validity and reliability tests using correlation method, which returned a coefficient of 0.879. The data collected were analyzed using regression analysis through the ordinary least square method, at a 5% level of significance. Findings revealed that a positive relationship exists between the variables (r = .973). A 95% change in new product development was accounted for by changes in open collaboration in the plastic manufacturing sector in Southeast Nigeria (R2 = .947, F = 2802.884, p-value < 0.05). The study, therefore, concluded that involving customers in the process of new product creation is key to its acceptability by the public. As a result, it was recommended that the managers and owners of plastic manufacturing companies need to find a way to get the customers involved in their idea generation and new product creation for a sustained creditable performance.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Firm Performance, Plastic Manufacturing Sector, Open Collaboration and New Product Development.
Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2021 Agbasi Emmanuela Obianuju, Nwosu Kanayo Chike , Dibua Emmanuel Chijioke
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Fair East Publishing has chosen to apply for the Creative Common Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 Licence (CC BY) license on our published work. Authors who wish to publish their manuscript in our journal agree on the following terms:1. Authors retain the copyright and grant us (Fair East Publishing and its subsidiary journals) the right for first publication with the work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. Under this license, author retains the ownership of the copyright of their content, but anyone is allowed to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the contents as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the publishers or authors.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (for example, publishing it as a book or submitting it to an institutional repository), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in Fair East Publishing owned journals.
3. We encourage our authors/contributors to post their work online (such as posting it on their website or some institutional repositories) prior to and during the submission process since it produces scholarly exchange and greater and earlier citation of published work.
