Involving Customers In New Service Development

This book deals with how companies can involve customers or users in order to learn with them in the field of service-based business development. It presents a variety of customer-involvement approaches, methods for learning with customers, and the results of case studies conducted in both service and manufacturing companies focusing on value-creation through services. Based on research carried out by several research groups around the world, as well as on illustrative cases, the book creates new actionable knowledge regarding customer-involvement which will be useful for both practitioners and scholars. Benefits for readers include: an understanding of the business potential of learning with customers and other users; an overview of the fields of new service development and customer-involvement with regard to concepts, theoretical frameworks, and models, in addition to strategies and techniques for involving users in fruitful ways during the innovation process; an illustration of the cases based on the results of empirical studies; and managerial implications and guidelines regarding how to manage customer-involvement during the different phases of the new service and business development process. Contents:Process of Customer Interaction in New Service Development (I Alam)The Role of the Customer in the Development Process (B Sandén et al.)Customers as Co-Innovators: An Initial Exploration of Its Strategic Importance (U Mannervik & R Ramirez)Customer-to-Customer Interaction in Service Development: A Many-to-Many Approach (E Gummesson)New Service Development: Learning from and with Customers (B Sandén et al.)Managing Ideas that are Unthinkable in Advance: A Matter of How and Where You Ask (P Kristensson)Learning from Experiments Involving Users in Service Innovation (P R Magnusson)Customer Involvement — Lessons Learned: A Study of Three Customer Involvement Projects at Volvo Cars (F Dahlsten)Service Encounter Analysis Based on Customer Retrospection (P Echeverri)How to Better Learn from Users (H Björkman)Video-Based Methodology: Capturing Real-Time Perceptions of Customer Processes (P Echeverri)Customer-Oriented Service Engineering as a Success Factor — Findings of Case Studies of Customer Integration in the Service Development Process (R Nägele)Service Innovation, User Involvement and Intellectual Property Management (C Hipp & C Herstatt)Customer and Supplier Involvement in New Service Development (F Hull et al.) Readership: Researchers and professionals in the fields of marketing, business development, strategy as well as service and product development. Suitable as a textbook for postgraduate courses like quality management, marketing, service management, operations management, and product management. Keywords:Customer Involvement;User Involvement;Service Development;Product Development;Innovation;Understanding CustomersKey Features:Several internationally-distinguished scholars present their latest findings concerning customer-involvementProvides readers with useful presentation and explanation of theories, augmented by illustrative examplesReviews:“This is a comprehensive text that addresses competently the general lack of knowledge regarding new service development and the different tools and approaches required … it is a high value resource for most in the NPD field interested in either new service development or even co-creation with customers applied to either products or services.”Journal of Product Innovation Management

This book deals with how companies can involve customers or users in order to learn with them in the field of service-based business development. It presents a variety of customer-involvement approaches, methods for learning with customers, and the results of case studies conducted in both service and manufacturing companies focusing on value-creation through services.Based on research carried out by several research groups around the world, as well as on illustrative cases, the book creates new actionable knowledge regarding customer-involvement which will be useful for both practitioners and scholars.Benefits for readers include: an understanding of the business potential of learning with customers and other users; an overview of the fields of new service development and customer-involvement with regard to concepts, theoretical frameworks, and models, in addition to strategies and techniques for involving users in fruitful ways during the innovation process; an illustration of the cases based on the results of empirical studies; and managerial implications and guidelines regarding how to manage customer-involvement during the different phases of the new service and business development process.

This text addresses the issues of how to develop new service products - where the concept of service has moved from transaction to experience. The authors draw upon the expertise of internationally recognised authors.

A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations "Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation." -Clayton Christensen For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm--that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually. In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated. Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives. With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to: Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possible Recognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors do Identify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer value Systematically define breakthrough products and services concepts Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.

'This book represents a significant step towards dealing with the lacuna constituted by the inadequacy of the literature on the services. And, as such, it approaches its task from a variety of directions.' From the foreword by William J. Baumol, New York University, US 'The Handbook of Innovation and Services is an exceptional volume. Its contributors, including Faïz Gallouj, William Baumol, Jean Gadrey, and Pascal Petit, are among the major thinkers in both the fields of the economics of services and the economics of innovation. Selected topics include the "cost disease", services innovation in the global economy, social innovation in the services, and innovation and employment in services. The book, I am sure, will become a standard reference volume in both these fields in the ensuing years.' Edward Wolff, New York University, US This Handbook brings together 49 international specialists to address an issue of increasing importance for the world's post-industrial economies; innovation as it relates to services. Contemporary economies have two fundamental characteristics. Firstly, they are service economies in as much as services account for more than 70 per cent of the wealth and jobs in most developed countries. Secondly, they are innovation economies as recent decades have seen an unprecedented development of scientific, technological, organisational and social innovations. This Handbook expertly links these two major characteristics in order to investigate the role of innovation in services, an issue that until now has been inadequately explored and one that poses many theoretical and operational challenges. This comprehensive volume encompasses the views of eminent scholars from a range of disciplines including economics, management, sociology and geography, and draws on a number of different analytical and methodological perspectives. With its multi-disciplinary approach this Handbook will be an invaluable reference source for academics and students in the fields of economics, management and the geography of services and innovation. Public authorities and managers in the service sector will also find this book fascinating.

All the world's most advanced economies are dominated by service. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employees. The questions posed in the book are: (1) How is it growing; (2) what are these new service innovations; (3) what are the drivers; and (4) how can organizations work with service innovations in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. Based on this view, we develop a model of service innovation and develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective; how should an organization view its customers in order to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.

We all live in a service-based economy right now, and the role of customers has changed from passive buyers to active value creators. Customers are actively engaged in the value creation process, and customer value creation behavior has become an essential phenomenon. For the competitive advantage of the firm, employees need to change from exclusive service providers to value facilitators. Firms must now change their paradigm from treating customers as mere buyers to engaging customers as value creators. This book sheds insight into the essentiality of understanding customer value creation behavior for enhancing firm performance. This book is also a comprehensive reference critically analyzing the current state of customer value creation behavior. It covers theoretical foundations, measurement, antecedents and consequences of customer value creation behavior, in addition to applications in specific and various contexts. The book also highlights the importance of understanding the dimensional structure of customer value creation behaviour for accurate results of empirical research. In addition, the book also examines customer value destruction behavior or dysfunctional customer behavior. This book challenges the conventional belief that handling customer complaints equates with handling dysfunctional customer behavior and provides useful insights for handling employees and customers.

The two-volume Advances in Information Systems Development: Bridging the Gap between Academia and Industry constitutes the collected proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Information Systems Development: Methods and Tools, Theory and Practice – ISD’2005 Conference. The focus of these volumes is to examine the exchange of ideas between academia and industry and aims to explore new solutions. The proceedings follow the seven conference tracks highlighted at the Conference: Co-design of Business and IT; Communication and Methods; Human Values of Information Technology; Service Development and IT; Requirements Engineering in the IS Life-Cycle; Semantic Web Approaches and Applications; and Management and IT.