Angel or Devil? The Influence of Virtual Testing Environment on Product Evaluation
Ling Peng, Yongfu He · 2009
While new product evaluation testing plays a pivotal role in NPD process, there is little empirical evidence on the influence of virtual testing environment on the evaluation results and the data quality. The present study addressed this gap in the literature by using a split sample on-line concept testing like study to compare the testing results in traditional and virtual environment for five heterogeneous innovations. The findings indicate that both traditional and virtual testing environment yield identical evaluation scores, while the latter provides better quality of data given the same sampling design. Early concept or product tests therefore may be carried out in a more realistic testing environment using virtual techniques to substantially enhance the quality of testing data.