Enhancing innovation through customer involvement

Enhancing innovation through customer involvement

Bärtsch, J.K.

Buijs, J.A. (mentor)
Roscam Abbing, E. (mentor)
Moor, N. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

PIM

Master of Science Strategic Product Design

2011-06-17

Swisscom Schweiz AG (SC) is the number one telecommunications provider in Switzerland. As the company is currently undergoing a transition from serving telecommunications only to expanding its offering to include internet, multimedia and entertainment solutions, the company is getting into a broader and fiercer field of competition. SC Innovation & Strategy is the business unit responsible for delivering innovations matching the overall company strategy. This thesis project revolves around the question of how customers can be effectively involved in the innovation ecosystem through online communities. The POST framework is used to develop a co-creation platform where users submit, comment on, rate and build ideas. The platform is integrated in the existing SC Labs platform, which is already connected to an early adopter community of over 6,000 users. Role-play testing of a working prototype and a short period of beta testing indicate strong potential for most of the input into incremental innovations. The quantity of user contributions is substantial for over 160 ideas and around 300 comments flowing within four weeks. A subset of participants were interviewed in a pre-test and a post-test semi-structured technique. The results revealed an overall acceptance and a high degree of motivation for further participation on the platform. The strongest point of the critique was the low degree of process transparency. Indications that more radical innovations could be produced from the platform are present in some ideas. The focus is on user-generated content. The platform is a space where the user is more powerful than the company. Therefore, direct and targeted challenges should be posed to users through the proposed context framing method where content is asked around a blog entry or news story. Extending the borders of an innovation ecosystem to an expert consumer base has been a successful strategy for several other leading global companies such as Dell, Google and Starbucks. To fully adopt the platform and intertwining it deeper in the innovation process at SIS, for disruptive innovations, and at RES, SME and CBU, for incremental innovations, faster and better innovations are therefore necessary Concluding, the platform needs the support of higher management in the process. If user contributions do not receive this support, they will remain entries on a platform that will become meaningless to its users over time. Initially, success stories need to be built around incremental innovations to maintain the level of motivation currently present. Eventually, more radical innovations have to be leveraged again by higher management.

Open innovation
Co-creation
Social media

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a3314e30-ee5d-4641-b400-0403e76fc228

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Bärtsch, J.K.