WEB-BASED CUSTOMER INTEGRATION FOR PRODUCT DESIGN: THE ROLE OF HEDONIC VS UTILITARIAN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Integrating customers into the innovation process is gaining popularity among companies as means of addressing competitive and market pressures. At the same time, companies are faced with the challenge of selecting appropriate customer integration methods to sustain customers´ engagement and elicit contributions that are useful. We draw from previous research in consumer behaviour to identify customer experience as an important determinant of customers´ overall participation in the design phase of the innovation process. Based on the compatibility principle, we propose a research model which examines the effect of a match between the type of product that customers are required to design, and the nature of customer experience (hedonic vs. utilitarian) they are provided with on their overall engagement with the customer integration process. A brief outline of the experimental study in which the proposed research model will be subsequntly tested is presented. The aim of this research is to select and design appropriate web-based customer integration methods depending on the task that customers have to perform

How brands enchant: Insights from observing community driven brand creation

This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of community- driven brand creation. Drawing on a longitudinal netnographic study of the "outdoorseiten.net" online community, it develops the concept of "community brands." Community brands are consumercreated brands that enchant their participants by providing creative social spaces, in which they innovate, discuss, manufacture, and brand customized products independently from corporate agents. The study reveals influential expressions of authenticity, creativity, community, and independence within such a social space and derives valuable implications for consumer culture theory and branding

Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation

Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches – imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public health praxis into a dialogue, this conversation style contribution points out several broader implications of changing disease surveillance. The conversation covers epidemiological issues such as the shift from expert knowledge to algorithmic knowledge, the securitization of global health, and the construction of new kinds of threats. Those developments are detailed and discussed in their impacts for health provision in a broader sense

Infrastrukturen der Biosicherheit

Angesichts unkalkulierbarer Bedrohungsszenarien werden Prognosen und Früherkennung immer wichtiger. Die verfügbaren Werkzeuge hierfür sind selbst politisch operativ und etablieren eine »Zukunft als Katastrophe« mit entsprechenden Konsequenzen. Henning Füller setzt den Fokus auf verbundene Machtwirkungen und zeigt, dass mit Monitoring-Techniken postpolitische Vorentscheidungen performativ getroffen werden. Seine Fallstudie zur Anwendung des indikatorbasierten Verfahrens Syndromic Surveillance in den USA befasst sich exemplarisch unter anderem mit der Bearbeitung öffentlicher Gesundheit als Sicherheitsproblem sowie mit der Etablierung des Ist-Zustands als Horizont des Politischen

User generated brands and their contribution to the diffusion of user innovations

It has been argued that users can create innovations and also diffuse them peer-to-peer independent of support or involvement by producers: that “user-only” innovation systems can exist. It is known that users can be incented to innovate via benefits from in-house use. But users’ incentives to invest in diffusion are much less clear: benefits that others might obtain from their innovation can be largely or entirely an externality for user innovators. Of course, effective distribution of information products can be done near-costlessly via posting downloadable content – for example, software – on the Internet. However, potential adopters must still learn about the product and trust its qualities. In producer systems, this aspect of diffusion is heavily supported via the creation of trusted brands. It has been shown that brands help to increase awareness, to communicate a product's benefits, and to reduce perceived risks of adoption. The development of brands by producers is traditionally seen as a very costly exercise – unlikely to be thought of as worthwhile by users who expect little or no benefits from the diffusion of their innovations to others. In this paper, we explore the creation of a strong and trusted brand by the Apache software community – and find it was created costlessly, as a side effect of normal community functioning. We think the costless creation of strong brands is an option that is generally available to user innovation communities. It supports, we propose, the existence of robust, user-only innovation systems by helping to solve the problem of low-cost diffusion of trusted user-developed innovations

Leveraging Customer-integration Experience: A Review of Influencing Factors and Implications

Organizations have increasingly begun to co-create innovations, conduct idea competitions, or conduct crowdsourcing initiatives with customers in online communities. Yet, many customer-integration methods fail to attract sufficient customer participation and engagement. We draw on previous research to identify customers’ experience as an important determinant of whether customer-integration initiatives succeed. However, research has rarely applied the notion of experience in the context of customer integration. We conduct a cross-disciplinary literature review to identify the factors that constitute a positive customer-integration experience and the implications of the customer-integration experience. Based on 141 papers from marketing, technology and innovation management, information systems, human-computer interaction, and psychology research, we derive a framework for customer-integration experience that integrates 22 conceptually different influencing factors, 15 implications, and their interrelatedness based on motivation-hygiene theory. The framework sheds light on the current state of research on customer-integration experience and identifies possibilities for future research

Exploring Machine-based Idea Landscapes – The Impact of Granularity

Effective exploration of a landscape full of crowdsourced ideas depends on the right search strategy, as well as the level of granularity in the representation. To categorize similar ideas on different granularity levels modern natural language processing methods and clustering algorithms can be usefully applied. However, the value of machine-based categorizations is dependent on their comprehensibility and coherence with human similarity perceptions. We find that machine-based and human similarity allocations are more likely to converge when comparing ideas across more distant solution clusters than within closely related ones. Our exploratory study contributes to research on the navigability of idea landscapes, by pointing out the impact of granularity on the exploration of crowdsourced knowledge. For practitioners, we provide insights on how to organize the search for the best possible solutions and control the cognitive demand of searchers

The powerfull and the powerless. PISA and the media - judgments of the journalist

"PISA ist in der öffentlichen Debatte anderer Staaten kein Thema. In Deutschland existiert hingegen eine unvorstellbare Dichte an PISA-Berichten. Es gibt darin sicher grobe journalistische Fehlleistungen. ... Nur können solche Fehler nicht als Ursache dafür herangezogen werden, dass es weder eine Diskussion über die Schulstruktur gegeben hat noch dafür, dass Strukturentscheidungen (bisher) nicht gefällt wurden." Der Autor sieht wichtige Ursachen zum einen in der "Modernisierungsbremse" Föderalismus, zum anderen in einem Schulsystem, das noch "im Klassendenken des 19. Jahrhunderts verhaftet" ist. (DIPF/Orig./Un)The PISA discussion wouldn\u27t have occurred as it did without the intensive reporting in the German press. The public perceived the results as a scandal for the schools and the school system, but the main causes weren\u27t reported." The author criticizes that "the power of the press is powerless opposite the ignorance of the conservatives who don\u27t want to change the selective and undemocratic structures of the German educational system. (DIPF/Orig.

The More the Merrier? The Effects of Community Feedback on Idea Quality in Innovation Contests

Innovation contests represent a novel and popular approach for organizations to leverage the creativity of the crowd for organizational innovations. In this approach, ideators present their initial ideas to a global community of potential users, and solicit their feedback for idea improvement or refinement. However, it is not clear which types of feedback lead to the development of better ideas and which contingent factors moderate these relationships. In this study, we examine the role of community feedback on idea development in online innovation contests, by using feedback intervention theory to develop a set of hypotheses relating community feedback and idea quality, and then testing those hypotheses using data from ZEISS VR ONE innovation contest. Our analysis suggest that task information feedback does lead to improvement in idea quality, while task learning and task motivation feedback does not, and the number of users providing feedback moderate the relationship between feedback and idea quality. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed