With the rapidly changing global competition, organisations are adapting a more agile way of improving their ability to innovate, engage, and maintain a competitive edge over their competitors, while building upon new and existing clients. Through the process of ‘Knowledge acquisition', the Prosumer and Consumers can reshape communities' participatory involvements within the IT Sector to improve innovations and services. Organisations are responding to these trends within the IT sector by developing new products and improving existing products, by harnessing the consumers in the process of knowledge exploration, creating innovation, and the co-creation of value of new products. This research looks at identifying key behavioural traits associated with Prosumerism and how ICT organisations can evolve to harness this power to compete in a global market.
TopIntroduction
This chapter explores the innovative processes, which the IT sectors are adopting to support the rapidly changing global market with different strategies for incorporating prosumers, customer-centricity, collective intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 to improve production, from Service Concepts to New Service Development (NSD). Prosumer environments are characterised by user participation resonating in-between the service creation and the provision process (Gupta, Gupta and Nagi. 2012; Gakewska, 2014). Prosumers constitute an important market power in the future as demands for the IT market evolves and takes shape for the next generation of technologies. Prosumers can determine whether investments in the IT market can have a direct impact on organisations from the finance to manufacturing. The IT market relies on innovative and investments to unlock new market opportunities, market trends, and stay ahead of competitors within the market/globally. Weber, Weggeman and Van Aken (2012) indicates that customers are vital to the innovation process because they can bring ideas to the transformations and production stage ranging from new product and services. Furthermore, the market's reaction to announcements of innovative and non-innovative IT investments is independent of industry classification. Individuals participating in this society can provide the industry opportunities for them to get involved in the service development stage. The IT market is aware of the evolving needs of the prosumer and by accommodating their personalised views they can quickly develop new products and services. One way of accommodating these individuals’ needs is by using Quality Function Development (QFD), which is used to ensure that every decision is made based upon matching the customer (prosumer) needs to the correct service. QFD is a customer-driven tool used to provide a means of highlighting a close awareness of customer desires, blended together within corporative focus groups to determine how and where they should be assigned within the product and service development (Wang, and Shih, 2013).
The ICT market does this by allowing prosumers to influence the design and integration process (service concept); we can later apply such methods like user-centricity, personalisation and user modelling into the whole process. Specifically, through study of this chapter the reader should be able to:
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Recognise the Service Concept.
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Evaluate New Service Development (NSD) Models.
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Differentiate user needs.
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Identify how human psychological characteristics may influence the Prosumer.
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Produce Prosumer specification to improve IT market development.
TopUser Characteristics Belonging To The Service Concept (Sc)
The SC is the most important part within the process of designing a new service or redesigning an existing one. Within the service concept process every little detail belonging to a component of the new or existing service must be considered, this would normally include everything from the initial idea and design phases to the finalised product. With the rapid development within the IT industry, these processes are ongoing; every time existing technologies change the SC process must be re-visited and re-evaluated. According to Monk (2002), processes regarding the role of services and design are extremely important due to a means of achieving sustainable development. These production processes could vary from technological advancement, intellectual properties rights, branding of products to the complete cycle of development. It is these processes that are important within the service organisation. Brodie, Hollebeek, Juric, and LLic (2011) indicate that it is these perspectives that recognize the consumer behaviour in particular, interactive and value co-creative/creative while taking part in the whole SC cycle. Customer behaviour through relational perspective allows individuals to interact with different departments and the workforce and can influence the direction of the organisation depending on what trends are happening within the IT industry market (Brodie, et al. 2011).