Is the active involvement of customers, whether considered as individuals and/or communities, in the firm OI processes which can take place directly, through an OI platform created and managed by the firm or indirectly, thanks to the skilled and professional interface put in place and run by OI intermediaries.
Published in Chapter:
Open Innovation through Customers: Collaborative Web-Based Platforms for Ethically and Socially Responsible New Products Part 2
Barbara Aquilani (University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy) and Tindara Abbate (University of Messina, Italy)
Copyright: © 2014
|Pages: 38
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5880-6.ch017
Abstract
This chapter aims at analyzing how firms can successfully embrace an Open Innovation (OI) process through customers, involving them individually or in communities, in the co-creation of ideas, knowledge, products, services, processes, putting into action and integrating their creativity with firms' resources. Three main areas of interest, essential in the authors' opinion to meet this new challenge, have been analyzed through a literature review process, to create a framework able to show the challenges organizations have to meet externally (i.e., consumerism) and internally (i.e., organizational changes) in this shift of the innovation paradigm: consumerism features and challenges, OI approach and web-based platforms, and organizational issues involved in the OI paradigm shift. The previous chapter has discussed consumerism and OI approach, while this one will afford OI platforms and organizational changes as well as the resulting framework. Four contributions distinguish this study: (i) the link between consumerism and OI; (ii) the focus on customers as a source of external innovation; (iii) the identification of alternative ways to access OI with customers and their features; (iv) the disclosure of a “hybrid” mode to develop OI through customers.