Developing products based on customers’ needs is one of the key success factors for companies in today’s global market. As a result, in recent years, the involvement of customers during the product development process has increased significantly. Companies are trying to gather customer feedback as early as possible in the development process in order to understand customer value. However, reliable customer value can only be gathered once customers have gained experience in using the product. There-fore, companies usually need to wait until the late stages of the product development process after already determining product design and committing most of the costs.
The objective of this thesis is to introduce the concept of a fully functional mock-up, and to explain the role of these mock-ups in assisting companies to construct value propositions for their products in the early stages of product development. In this way, companies can share the whole product concept with the customers very early in the development process and enable them to experience using the product. This allows companies to not only receive customer feedback based on real user experience, but also to analyze customer value before committing most of the costs.
This study shows that fully functional mock-ups were effective communication tools both internally among development team members and externally with customers. Furthermore, they provided the possibility for a real customer experience and offered enough information to build convincing, accurate value propositions in the early stages of the product development process. In addition, fully functional mock-ups enable companies to modify their product design based on customers’ real needs, thus preventing or at least diminishing possible financial losses in the future. This study is limited to cost-reducing innovations at a low level of technical complexity
