Customer Integration in Service Innovation: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Prominent industry projects, as well as an extensive literature suggest the importance of customer integration for companies' innovation success. This appears to be especially true for service firms, which inherently build on customer interaction. Despite this appreciation of the approach, there are comparably few empirical analyses of the positive and negative effects of customer integration. In this exploratory study, we build on established customer role concepts to study the status quo of customer integration in industry, as well as reservations against the roles and negative experiences from customer integration projects. The study reveals a gap between reservations and actual negative experiences in losing know-how, as well as a positive effect of experience in customer integration on perceived benefits for the company. In the next section we introduce and discuss the individual customer roles. This is followed by the description of the methodology and the presentation of the results from the empirical study conducted. Thereafter, we present a discussion of the results, incorporating findings from two subsequent expert interviews and an outlook on future work. Customer RolesThere are different roles a customer can adopt when he is involved in a company's innovation processes. While typical functions of the customer are widely discussed in the corresponding literature

The Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility on Service Innovation Performance: The Role of Dynamic Capability for Sustainability

“…Externally, factors studied so far include customer involvement in service innovation, stakeholder relationships and support, and coordination between the firm and its partners [15][16][17]. For instance, Geum et al found that the provision of suppliers' support using their valuable knowledge and technology contributes to the service innovation of the firm [18]; Straub et al argued that the participation of customers, acting as a service-specifier and quality-controller in the innovation process, is crucial to the success of service innovation [19]; and Rusanen et al claimed that network capability positively affects the performance of service innovation by improving the effectiveness of relationship learning [20].…”

Does Service Innovation Matter in High-Tech Industry?

“…Service innovation, a concept that has long been studied in service management research, is a part of the basis for different issues in the service industry such as customerinvolvement (Bendapudi and Leone 2003), knowledge transformation (Muller and Zenker 2001), cooperation (Mention 2011), innovation patterns (Chang et al 2012), and servicespecific measurement (Hipp and Grupp 2005). Beyond the service industry, researchers have recently begun to examine the high-tech industry within the contexts of co-production (Chen et al 2011), small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) (Amara et al 2008), knowledge acquisition (Cassiman and Veugelers, 2006), and customer integration (Straub et al 2013). Service innovation was first discussed by Vandermerwe and Rada (1989), who refer the process of creating value by adding services to product offering.…”