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

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

Decision Support for the Selection of Appropriate Customer Integration Methods

Co-creating innovations with external stakeholders, such as customers, is gaining popularity among companies as a way to address the competitive and market pressures they face. To this end, research has brought forward a notable number of customer integration methods. The selection of a particular method is governed by various organizational constraints; there is, however, a paucity of research providing decision support for practitioners in terms of when to use which customer integration method. Using the design science approach, our research addresses this research gap by implementing a decision support system to assist practitioners in the selection of appropriate customer integration methods. We elicit requirements from literature and expert interviews, and subsequently design, implement, and evaluate a prototype of the system. Based on identified requirements, the prototype is implemented as a web-based tool (HTML5). The DSS tool aims to acquaint practitioners with use cases and experiences with different customer integration methods