High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
”CO-CREATION BY CUSTOMERS VIA EMBEDDEDTOOLKITS – A NEW WAY TO OPEN INNOVATIONWITH CUSTOMERS”
Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen University January 2010
In this paper, Prof. Frank Piller summarizes a research paper presented in a track on “Collaboration Systems for Open Innovation” at The Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It was nominated for thebest paper of the conference.
Product definition has been shown to be critical to new product success
.
User satisfaction (and, thus, adoption)with a new product regularlyincreases with the degree of fitbetween a user’s needs and thecharacteristics of a product.Conventionally, the manufacturer triesto understand this causal networkwith detailedinformation eitheracquired via marketresearch or assumedvia professionalknowledge. Previousresearch has shown,however, that manycompanies fail togather this requiredinput in an efficientand effective way:Despite ever increasingmethodological knowledge in marketresearch, new product development(NPD) flop rates continue to rise.MIT researcher Eric Von Hippel hasexplained the problem of firms tounderstand what customers reallywant by the stickiness of needinformation. Sticky information iscontext specific and difficult toformalize and transfer. Stickiness of customer (need) information is afunction of multiple factors, includingcharacteristics inherent in theinformation itself, such as the wayinformation is encoded. Customersoften use a differentlanguage to describetheir demands and thinkin different designparameters than themanufacturer. As aresult, firms regularlyhave to change designparameters as therequirements(representinginformation about thecustomers’ needs) are not stableduring NPD. Even in highly specializedindustrial markets, customers face aninherent difficulty in accuratelyspecifying their needs at the outset of a NPD project, resulting in a co-evolution of the technologicalsolution with the revision of customers’ articulated needs.
”CO-CREATION BY CUSTOMERS VIA EMBEDDEDTOOLKITS – A NEW WAY TO OPEN INNOVATIONWITH CUSTOMERS”
Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen University January 2010
Customers oftenuse a different language to describe their demands and think in different design parameters than themanufacturer.
Research further has shown thatfamiliarity with existing productattributes can interfere with anindividual’s ability to express needsfor novel products. Needs becomemore refined as users come in directcontact with (a prototype of) a newproduct.
Embedded toolkits as enablers foropen innovation
In our paper, my co-authors ChristophIhl and Frank Steiner and I propose anew approach to accomplish thisobjective by applying a typicalprocess of user innovation as a formof open innovation: embeddedtoolkits for user co-design.
Our idea is to shift somespecifications of the product into thedomain of the user. This strategyisolates the source of uncertainty, i.e.sticky information about user needs.A product with a respective toolkitshould hence contain (1) a flexiblearchitecture where the values for eachdesign parameter are not fixed, butadaptable, (2) a set of rules aboutpossible combinations of selection of values for each design parameter, and(3) an interface for individual userscould differentiate the productaccording to their preferences bymanipulating the values. Note thatour idea is NOT to configure aproduct with an internet-based toolkitBEFORE it is being manufactured, astypical for a mass customization orbuild-to-order strategy. Theseconfiguration toolkits have alreadybeen subject of a rather intensivediscussion; and there are manyexamples of this strategy in practice(e.g., NikeID, Dell, BMW). In ourconcept, users shall be enabled tomodify the product AFTER it has beenmanufactured and has reached theuser domain. The key requirement of this concept is a user interface thatallows users themselves to adapt aproduct according to their ownrequirements, hence addressing acore characteristic of open innovationwith users. The embedded toolkitshall equip users with the possiblesolution capabilities to substitute thelack of professional training andexperience.In our concept, the toolkit is beingembedded in the productarchitecture, allowing its real-timemodification during the usage stage.Consider the example of a dashboardof an automobile. A conventionalinterface allows the user just tointeract with the car and to controlspecific predefined functionality. Inour approach, the user interactioncould go much further.
”CO-CREATION BY CUSTOMERS VIA EMBEDDEDTOOLKITS – A NEW WAY TO OPEN INNOVATIONWITH CUSTOMERS”
Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen University January 2010
Add a Comment