User involvement competence for radical innovation

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Abstract

One important market related capability for firms which seek to develop radical innovations is the competence to involve the ‘right’ users at the ‘right’ time in the ‘right’ form. While former studies have identified a rather passive role of users in the radical innovation process, this paper focuses on the involvement of such users that are in the position to play an active role as inventors and (co)-developers. A multiple case study analysis was conducted in the field of medical technology. Five radical innovation projects within four firms were selected including medical robots and computer-assisted navigation systems. The case study analysis reveals that firms who closely interact with specific users benefit significantly for their radical innovation work. These users have a high motivation toward new solutions, are open to new technologies, possess diverse competencies, and are embedded into a very supportive environment.

Section snippets

Introduction, literature review, and research objectives

In today's environment of rapid technological change firms cannot rely on incremental innovations alone. To sustain long-term competitiveness firms need to generate radical innovations as well. Such innovations typically incorporate completely new and highly complex technologies, shift market structures, and require user learning as they often induce significant behavior changes on side of the users (e.g. Urban et al., 1996). To develop radical innovations, firms depend on technological and

Conceptual framework of user involvement competence

To systematically involve users into the innovation process, firms need a special competence on the organizational level. Based on former literature a conceptual framework for such a competence is developed in this section. This framework serves as an analysis grid for the empirical study.

Conceptually, two dimensions of a user involvement competence can be distinguished. First, firms need to know which users are capable to provide valuable inputs in innovation projects (Gruner and Homburg, 2000

Methodology

To study the addressed research questions, I conducted an explorative case study analysis in the field of medical technology. The approach of case study research was used due to the nature of the research questions as well as the relatively little knowledge available in the addressed research field (Yin, 1994, Gillham, 2000, Stake, 2000). The industry of medical technology was selected for two reasons. First, former empirical studies show that users play an important role for new product

Importance of user involvement competence

The case study analysis reveals that manufacturing firms that involved capable users in distinct phases of the innovation process benefited significantly from the users’ contributions. This result highlights the importance of a user involvement competence on firm-level for radical innovation projects. Table 2 summarizes the effects of users’ contributions for the innovating firms.

In those cases in which users played the roles as inventors and (co)-developers, manufacturing firms who took over

Discussion and conclusions

The findings have implications for the capability of a firm to more systematically leverage the potential of users in the radical innovation process. With regard to the subject dimension of user involvement competence, the case study analysis provides first insights about the profile of users that are in the position to generate ideas, (co)-develop and successfully test prototypes for radical innovations. These users differ significantly from those user types that are typically involved in

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eric Von Hippel, Christian Luethje and Cornelius Herstatt for directing my research effort and three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions that helped improve the article.

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