Customer Involvement

Companies have gradually been forced to reconsider their basic approach to the creation and marketing of new ideas. Traditional R&D has been considered costly and vague. Customer involvement has been extensively employed in management rhetoric as an approach to stiffening the feedback loop between expenditure and production cycles. Among such perceptions is the assumption that customers are important sources of information and knowledge, and it is acknowledged that customer involvement can improve NPD.

Tan et al. recently investigated how some firms are able to determine their customers' needs and then innovate to meet those needs. Such companies are considered to be much more profitable than others. These champions of innovation are able to merge their ambitions and key abilities with their customers. Accordingly, a strong market orientation and the capability of managers to acquire customer needs are perceived as significant reasons for the development of new products. For example, in the software industry, customer involvement through new techniques and methods has become popular. Bosch-Sijtsema and Bosch described 'agile' software developments, where customers are actively engaged in designing software and pooling resources with the development teams. Previous literature has demonstrated how firms are able to benefit from teaming up with customers or from acquiring customers' feedback and input. Such methods and techniques come from both marketing research and R&D. They centre on three key phases in the NPD process: prospect identification; development; testing and product launch. Many studies have looked principally at the theoretical and early NPD phases. For example, as determined in the PIMS/IMD Brand Innovation Study, growth rates and market share are higher if customers' assessment of the value of a new product is ascertained in the initial phases of NPD. As a result, approaches are required that permit the active involvement of customers in NPD. Only if customers are able to better comprehend a new product will they be able to sensibly evaluate whether or not they like it and whether it fulfils a latent (and possibly hitherto unrecognised) need. Companies that are able to recognise customers' latent needs and to have this data inform new product features or entire products will be much more likely to develop successful novel products. As long as managers are able to identify the needs of customers, they will be capable of creating enhanced, customer-centred new products.

Nonetheless, there are challenges in involving customers in the development of new products and services. As pointed out by Nambisan, one key challenge is simply to get in touch with customers in an effective way. As suggested by Füller et al., information related to customers' needs is often costly for product managers to capture. Customer incentives, company identification and socialising are vital for customers to have their knowledge shared with NPD managers. As stated by Janssen and Dankbaar, customer involvement leads to a superior product, but they argue that further insight is necessary, from diverse sources, as a way of acquiring and analysing customer inputs. Nambisan states that customers' motivations to contribute includes outcome control and enhanced self-esteem, while Antikainen et al. point out that community coordination and entertainment are additional factors. According to Nambisan, engaging customers as NPD co-creators can result in greater project uncertainty, as so requires additional evaluation and control. In addition, customers may frequently require extra knowledge regarding the technology and product under assessment, resulting in a likelihood of customer training costs.

In short, the critical issues in customer involvement concern its cost-effectiveness, how to structure customer input, and how to achieve a broad representation of the customer base. This research aims to overcome these challenges by unlocking the power of big data. In the following section, we introduce the concept of big data, which can be used to improve customer involvement and enable managers to capture customers' explicit and implicit knowledge to support NPD.