Virtual customer integration in the innovation process: Evaluation of the web platforms of multinational enterprises (MNE)

Abstract

Integrating the customer in the innovation process is believed to be a powerful means to reduce failure rates and to increase the revenue from new products. Although many companies have launched programs to enable such integration, the understanding of the mechanisms behind successful programs remains limited. Furthermore, the benefit of integrating customers in the innovation process has to be weighed against the costs. Virtual customer integration has been discussed as a way to limit these costs and bring the benefits of potentially unlimited scalability.Using a sample of the Euro Stoxx 50 companies, we shed light on the various types of virtual customer integration platforms, their limitations, their benefits and the mechanisms that have to be put in place to make them succeed. Results indicate that only a limited number of platforms go beyond the sourcing of ideas. Especially the integration of the customer in the execution phase of the innovation process remains largely limited to digital goods.

Product Planning techniques: investigating the differences between research trajectories and industry expectations

“…Benchmarking analyses, usually performed by marketing experts, are used to analyse the business context, while the decisions about definition and selection of the most promising product ideas are in charge of design teams. This category of methods includes the so-called ''technology push'' strategies (Chidamber and Kon 1994;Rohrbeck et al 2008;Brem and Voigt 2009;Di Stefano et al 2012), in which emerging technologies can be exploited as driving forces for disruptive innovations (Wall et al 2013). However, the use of a new technology is not generally sufficient to ensure market success (Leinsdorff 1995;Flint 2002;Haig 2011).…”

Motivation Orientations in Innovation Contests: Why People Participate

“…However, motivations underlying participation in self-engagement activities have been investigated in different empirical settings, such as open-source software development (Linux case in Hars and Ou, 2001; Apache Projects in Roberts et al, 2006;in Lakhani and Von Hippel, 2003), open-knowledge communities (Wikipedia in Rafaeli and Ariel, 2008), the communities of practice (Wasko and Faraj, 2005), the web platform for virtual NPD (Füller et al, 2010;Fuller, 2006;Rohrbeck et al, 2008;Ihl et al, 2012), customer communities (Füller et al, 2008) and online innovation communities (Janzik and Herstatt, 2008).…”

Application of evolutionary computation techniques for the identification of innovators in open innovation communities

“…Online user innovation communities make use of Internet as the prime communication channel, allowing company-to-customer as well as customer-to-customer communications (Di Gangi & Wasko, 2009;Rohrbeck, Steinhoff, & Perder, 2008). This strategy assumes that new product developments require interactions among like-minded customers who talk about their usage experiences, raise questions, present solutions, and offer answers (Fueller & Matzler, 2007).…”