Proactive Involvement of Consumers in Innovation: Selecting Appropriate Techniques

Abstract

There are many techniques for the involvement of consumers to support the development of innovations, but knowledge is lacking in the appropriateness of different techniques in various situations. This is, especially, true for consumer involvement in radical innovation. This paper presents the requirements of consumer involvement in different situations, covering the two main phases of the development process, and specified for three types of radical product innovation. Based on a review of literature, we identified four characteristics of consumers-involvement techniques and developed a mix of differentiating characteristics for six situations in the new product development, which form the basis of a model to select the appropriate techniques. We then evaluated this model by using a historical comparative case-study approach. This paper contributes to the understanding of the appropriateness of different techniques for the proactive involvement of consumers to support the development of radical product innovations.

The Link between the Consumer and the Innovations in Food Product Development

“…Other types of approach make use of indirect data, which can also be used to determine the optimal degree of fit of the new product with the expectation of consumers ( Figure 2). Examples of these include data on current food trends or aggregated data on environmental factors that affect consumers' needs and preferences, such as demographics, economical aspects, social and cultural factors or technological developments [11,12]. While the first, focusing on consumer involvement data collection and corresponding methodologies, have been more studied, the second group, namely study of consumer trends and socio-environmental factors, have been less analysed [10].…”

Managing Innovation

“…Therefore, one must acknowledge the 'push' factors relating to the positive aspect of the motivation, for example personal development or skills enhancements as mentioned above (Baldwin et al, 2006;Faulkner and Runde, 2009;Füller, 2010;Henkel and von Hippel, 2005). In a recent qualitative study on crowdsourcing by Brabham (2010) and Dankbaar (2008) in which they express that from the specific context of high-tech radical new product innovations, consumer involvement in the development process is driven by a "technological push" (p. 523). Consequently, they argue that the utilisation of a consumer perspective to construct the technology constitutes a significant reason for practitioners to involve the consumers.…”

“…Many recent academic studies now acknowledge that consumers and their communities play an increasingly vital role in innovation across many markets and industries (Berthon et al, 2007;Nambisan and Baron, 2007;Payne et al, 2009;Piller et al, 2010). User-centric innovation (UCI) has emerged as a crucial strategy for organisations in terms of their survival (Desouza et al, 2008), innovation development (Greer and Lei, 2012;Janssen and Dankbaar, 2008), closer customer relations (Jespersen and Buck, 2010) and achieving best practice (Enkel et al, 2005). The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater clarity and understanding of UCI from a user perspective, through a critical and systematic analysis of both the contemporary academic literature and the associated empirical studies into UCI.…”

Forecasting economic performance of implemented innovation openness

“…The first role users may have in NPD is that of advisor. In this role users act as information suppliers of positive and negative feedback as well as of suggestions for improvements of existing products or of new product ideas (Brockhoff 2003;Janssen and Dankbaar 2008;Kim and Bae 2008). The second role of users is that of selecting designs, types or versions to be marketed.…”