Investigating issues and challenges for customer involvement in business services innovation

Abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to investigate how customers may contribute to radical innovation in consultancy services and the conditions needed for customers to be involved in such radical service innovations.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a qualitative case study approach including rich descriptions based primarily on interviews to investigate an extreme example of successful customer involvement in the development of radical service innovations at Ramboll, a leading Scandinavian engineering consultancy.FindingsThe study reveals that customers may be involved in radical innovation processes to different degrees. However, actively involving customers in radical services innovation require a relationship between the customer company and the service provider that might be described as a partnership in which ongoing learning takes place to develop new solutions. The findings reveal that unsolved problems as well as personal trust are key in making customers involved in radical service innovations. Customers involved actively are further characterised by possessing high expertise and extraordinary personal engagement.Research limitations/implicationsAs in all case studies, the main limitation of the study is the generalisability of the findings. More cases would help to shed light on the generalisability of the findings across other radical innovation projects within the same company or in similar types of company.Originality/valueThe study contributes with new and detailed insights into both how to involve customers in radical service innovations and the conditions and challenges found in doing so.

The relation between innovation sources and ICT roles in facility management organizations

“…In addition, the role of the customer in the open service innovation found in this study was very important, as also shown by previous research (e.g. Nicolajsen and Scupola, 2011). The findings show that in the eight open innovation instances analysed, the organizations mostly take an ambidextrous strategic orientation towards the innovations in question, thus being in line with Tushman and O'Reilly (1996), who state that ambidexterity is the best strategic approach because it balances exploitation and exploration startegies.…”

Stakeholder integration in service innovation - an exploratory case study in the healthcare industry

“…Because this was perceived as a problem by project management, in this case, close and distant customers were integrated additionally. Though, according to findings by Nicolajsen and Scupola (2011) the readiness to collaborate is higher for trusted, close customers. Moreover, Alam (2002) and Carbonell et al (2012) showed that the integration of close customers leads to a better speed to market and superior services, since relational closeness and trust leads to a better understanding and more fine-grained information.…”

“…The studies on stakeholder integration by Alam (2002), Nicolajsen andScupola (2011) andCarbonell et al (2012) implicitly assume that customer integration is a direct process between the core innovation team and the integrated stakeholder. This is valid for customer integration in the idea generation of this case.…”

Impact of co-creation on innovation capability and firm performance: a structural equation modeling

“…Co-creation is an interactive dialogue between a firm performance and a group of consumers (Russo-Spena et al, 2011;Piller, Ihl and Vossen, 2010;Nicolajsen and Scupola, 2011), that can vary in depth of interaction, with the goal of jointly enhancing the value of the offerings to both the firms and the consumer (Magnusson et al, 2003;Maklan et al, 2008). The connection between the stage in which a firm get involved in co-creation and improvements in firm growth and profitability has been widely discussed (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b;Prahalad and Krishnan, 2008;Nicolajsen and Scupola, 2011;Macdonald et al, 2011;Lugosi, Janta and Watson, 2012). Firm Performance is the extent in which a firm is capable of reaching sustained competitive advantages as leveraged by resources that are valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable and have no strategically equivalent substitutes.…”