do too many chefs spoil the broth: customer involvement in mobile handset development

8/8/2019 Do Too Many Chefs Spoil the Broth: Customer Involvement in Mobile Handset Development

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Do Too Many Chefs Spoil the Broth?Customer Involvement in Mobile Handset Development.

Olga SasinovskayaJnkping International Business SchoolP.O.B. 1026, SE-551 11 JNKPING, SwedenTelephone: +4636101804Fax: +4636161069E-mail: [email protected]

Supervisor: Heln AndersonE-mail: [email protected]

16th EDAMBA Summer AcademySoreze, France

July 2007


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Do Too Many Chefs Spoil the Broth?Customer Involvement in Mobile Handset Development.

Abstract - The role of customers in new product development has recently attracted increasingattention from both scholars and practitioners. The general attitude towards user involvement in

developing process seem to be affirmative and optimistic, however some controversy still remains.

In the case of mobile handset development, practitioners primary focus is rather on business

customers and regulators requirements than on end-users need. The primary objective of this

research is to look at firm-customer interface, by discovering what kind of customer information is

taken into consideration during new mobile handset development process, how this information is

obtained, processed and further communicated into technical product specification.

Key words -user-involvement, new product development, mobile telecommunication industry,user-developer interface, communication, product innovation.

1. Problem Discussion Look at your mobile phone. Do you know how many features it has? How many of them do you use and how many of

them dont you know about? And who decides on how the handset should look like and what attributes it should contain?

Handset producer? Not solely. Who has the strongest influence from the outside then? Regulators, major business

customers or end-users? Which influence is stronger then and do product requirements given by mobile operators

correspond with end-users needs?

1.1. Industry perspective

Recently, the world markets have seen an explosion in the growth of information and

communication technologies, and particularly mobile communications. The mobile industry has

strong economic incentives for developing new products and services: operators are willing to

increase data traffic, handset manufacturers want customers to replace their old phones with new

models and end-users are interested in new features, which are becoming available with emerging

technologies. The question is are end-users really interested in all those new features or are they

indirectly forced to use them. The mainstream end-users can be categorised as late majority which

is not really interested in all the novelties (in contrary with lead-users or the innovators type,

which represents the minority end-users).


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Service and product innovations in mobile telecom market have been traditionally driven by

technology innovations (standards change, development of new platforms, etc.), which have opened

space for new ideas realisation. From this perspective the mobile telecom market could be described

as a supply-side or determined by technology push situations, which mean that a new

technology that works will sell itself. But what is the role of the customers then? Historically, most

successful mobile services were unexpected and designed without end-users interactions. Potential

users were even sceptical and suspicious (e.g. nobody wanted to believe that SMS could be a

success, since customers couldnt see the point of using mobile phones for writing text messages). A

similar situation with ring-tones: in 1998 Vesa-Matti Paananen, the founder of Add2Phone, spent

half a year to convince the leading Finish telecom companies to use existing technology and

implement the service. The payback time was under two months; most operators and content

providers across the whole of Europe followed these developments (Steinbock, 2005). It could be

argued that most radical and revolutionary innovations are typically developed by R&D groups

independently of the vision of the users they would serve (Mohr, 2001). Here the Ready, Fire, Aim

approach could be justified, in some way explaining telecom practitioners ambitions and their main

impact on marketing and advertising of the developed service/product, saying that consumers go

from consumption out of needs to consumption out of wants and desires.

So having these facts in mind what kind of attitudes towards customers might be shaped within the

company which produces mobile handsets? And in what ways is interaction taking place? In the case

of handset a producer clear distinction should be made between customers and end-users. Since

mobile operators are seen as major customers for the handset producer its reasonable to concentrate

on their requirements and let them take care of end-users (e.g. advertising). For example Sony

Ericsson outsourcers its market research activities, which might signify that end-users are not of a

primary interest for the company. Since the mobile operators main goal is to increase the traffic,

they might be interested in filling in the new handset with as many new features as possible. The

task of the handset producer is to scope out those requirements, taking into consideration technical

and economic reasons.

1.2. Recent research

The role of customers in new product development has recently attracted increasing attention from

both scholars and practitioners. The general attitude towards user involvement in developing process

seem to be affirmative and optimistic, however some controversy still remains.


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Recent findings reveal the positive influence of user involvement on product innovativeness in terms

of originality and user value (Magnusson, 2003; Matthing, et al., 2004). Contemporary research

emphasizes the importance of different sources of new product ideas, offering new approaches in

involving customers (see e.g. Alam & Perry, 2002; Matthing et al., 2006; Repo et al., 2004). Some

researchers claim that customer input should be basically obtained through meetings between

customers and development team, through observations and detailed interviews (Alam & Perry,

2002), while others criticize traditional marketing techniques, stressing that customers have trouble

imagining and giving feedback about something that they havent experienced, and hence

emphasizing the need of new approaches towards development process and customer involvement

(e.g. Kristensson, 2002). However practitioners seem to be quite conservative and employ traditional

market research (i.e. focus groups and customer surveys). Besides, while claiming to be customer-

oriented, practitioners are still relatively reluctant towards accepting pure customer-centric

approach (i.e. continuously collaborating and learning with customers).

Although some researchers believe that user involvement is a necessity for a successful innovation,

others argue that consumers have some problems in identifying their latent needs, and their ideas

tend to be unfeasible to implement (Anderson & Crocca, 1993; Magnusson, 2003). Nevertheless the

majority of scholars regard users as inspirers of new products, stressing the importance of customer

involvement in early stages of development process, namely idea generation and idea screening (e.g.

Alam, 2006; Franke et al., 2006; Gruner & Homburg, 2000).

Recent research on new product development provides valuable insights into user involvement

practices, particularly relationships between user involvement, customer satisfaction and new service

success. Gruner and Homburg (2000) based their empirical findings on the German machine

industry, studying the relationship between the intensity of user involvement during different stages

of product development, the characteristics of the involved customers and product success. Their

findings reveal that customer interaction during certain development phases has a positive impact on

new product success. However Gruner and Homburg (2000) employed a quantitative approach and

didnt concentrate on the nature of interactions between customers and developers.

Although scholars seem to be very confident about the importance of customer involvement,

practitioners are less optimistic. My conversations with Sony Ericsson product planner and

developers reveal that customer interface in product development process is a complex issue anduser involvement is not that explicit. Although product planners claim that they are developing a


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new product having a customer in mind, its not vivid which customer characteristics, ideas and

needs are taken into consideration and which are left aside. Interestingly, developers claim that there

is no customer involvement at all, and the only information they get is Product Requirements

Specification, which they can scope down if there are rational technical reasons for doing it.

Problems and uncertainties associated with customer involvement include communication barriers

between users and developers, time-consumption, increased efforts, low organizational fit and

difficulty of capturing the customers knowledge (Lilien et al., 2002).

2. Methodological implications

The first thing I realized about qualitative research is that it goes much deeper than the simple choice

of techniques and methods. Most of the literature on quantitative methods Ive read doesnt make

you think about ontology and epistemology that much. It seems like qualitative researchers are

forced to pick one of the paradigms and argue for the chosen research methods taking into

consideration their assumptions about ontology and human nature. Somehow its difficult for me to

put myself into suitable boxes, perhaps it will come with time. I dont believe in objectivity in

social science; however I dont see reality as a social construction either.

Im not going to discuss different school of thoughts or philosophical implications of my research in

this paper, but rather argue why I have chosen qualitative approach and move to the methods I find

suitable for fulfilling my primary objectives. It might sound clich, but the choice and value of

research method depends on what the researcher is trying to find out.

My primary objective is to look at firm-customer interface during the product development process;

to track how the customer information is obtained and processed, to what extent and in what ways

customers are involved in new product development. During the first stage of my research Id like to

look at the role of major business customers (i.e. mobile operators) in new mobile phone

development process. A handset producer (Sony Ericsson) will be the unit of analysis. Further, my

ambition is to track the mobile handset lifecycle and look at the end-users adoption behaviour.

2.1 Qualitative approach

The majority of user-involvement research employs quantitative approach, trying to measure the

intensity of involvement or find cause-effect relationships between involvement and differentvariables (e.g. customer satisfaction or product success). Actually there are some studies which show


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significant relation between user involvement and user satisfaction (e.g. McKeen, Guimaraes, &

Wetherbe, 1994). However it would be a bit nave to expect degree of participation as a frequency

variable to have a strong impact on user satisfaction or product success. There are other factors

which may have stronger influence on customer satisfaction (e.g. situational factors: developers

expertise, availability of appropriate development tools, etc. or customer expectations). Mc Keen et

als. (1994) study reveals that system development can be successful and the user might be satisfied

even in case of minimal user participation, while high user participation still may result in failure

and low level of satisfaction. These results indicate that user involvement is a rather complex issue,

which cant be simply identified and measured. Hence, quantitative approach might not be very

appropriate (especially for identifying different forms of involvement and interactions). Hatwick and

Barki (2001) introduce communication as an important dimension of user involvement. However for

the purpose of their study they looked at the communication activity only in terms of frequency of

information exchange between participants, not taking into consideration communication style or

communication effectiveness.

Its apparent that for the purpose of my research quantitative approach is not applicable, since I want

to look at the mechanisms through which involvement is apt to effect product development process

and to understand the nature of interactions between the company and customers. I also believe that

qualitative approach provides a researcher with tools which may lead to deeper understanding and a

probability to find out something very surprising. According to Silverman (2001) a single incident

noted by a perceptive observer contains the clue to understanding of a phenomenon.

Ive really liked Dafts (1983) discussion about ambiguity and high uncertainty at the outset of the

research. Actually if we understand phenomenon well enough to predict the research answer, why

bother to ask the question? However if we start with confusion and ambiguity it is more likely we

will get a surprising result. According to Daft (1983) quality of work is measured by intensity of

surprise. It also might be connected to the significance of the certain study: whether the purpose is

to test a hypothesis or answer an open-ended question. To my mind the latter is more ambitious for

social science.

2.1.1. Data collection

My ambition is to conduct a longitudinal study on a project group working on new mobile phone

model development in Sony Ericsson. I want to track the development process from the verybeginning (idea generation) till the product launch. If Im lucky with access Id like to employ real-


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time methodology to be able to capture a process as it unfolds over time. Ill start with direct

observations, ideally getting access to change control board and function groups meetings.

Otherwise I can carry out retrospective in-depth case study on one of the models development by

interviewing product planners, developers and other key respondents and collecting archival

materials.

Further Im going to employ a narrative approach by presenting my empirical data in a storylike

fashion. Perhaps it might be called The Story of the Mobile Handset with the emphasis on

interaction between involved actors during the development process. Besides, the Product

Requirement Specification which serves as a guide-line for developers might be seen as a narrative

itself. So itll be interesting to track how end-user needs and customers requirements are translated

into technical language.


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References

Alam, I. (2006). Removing the fuzziness from the fuzzy front-end of service innovations throughcustomer interactions. Industrial Marketing Management, 35 (4), 468-481.

Alam, I., & Perry, C. (2002). A customer-oriented new service development process. Journal of

Services Marketing, 16 (6), 515-534.Anderson, W. L., & Crocca, W. T. (1993). Engineering practice and codevelopment of product

prototypes. Communications of the ACM, 36 (6), 49-54.Daft, R., L. (1983). Learning the Craft of Organizational Research. Academy of Management. The

Academy of Management Review, 8 (4), 539-547.Franke, N., von Hippel, E., & Schreier, M. (2006). Finding Commercially Attractive User

Innovations: A Test of Lead-User Theory. Journal of Product Innovation Management,23 (4), 301-315.

Gruner, K. E., & Homburg, C. (2000). Does Customer Interaction Enhance New Product Success? Journal of Business Research, 49 (1), 1-14.

Hartwick, J., & Barki, H. (2001). Communication as a dimension of user participation. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 44 (1), 21-36.

Kristensson, P., Magnusson, P. R., & Matthing, J. (2002). Users as a Hidden Resource forCreativity: Findings from an Experimental Study on User Involvement. Creativity &

Innovation Management, 11 (1), 55-62.Magnusson, P. R. (2003). Benefits of involving users in service innovation. European Journal of

Innovation Management, 6 (4), 228-238.Matthing, J., Kristensson, P., Gustafsson, A., & Parasuraman, A. (2006). Developing successful

technology-based services: the issue of identifying and involving innovative users. Journal of Services Marketing, 20 (5), 288-297.

Matthing, J., Sanden, B., & Edvardsson, B. (2004). New service development: learning from andwith customers. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 15 (5), 479-498.

McKeen, J., D. , Guimaraes, T., & Wetherbe, J., C. . (1994). The Relationship between UserParticipation and User Satisfaction: An Investigation of Four Contingency Factors. MISQuarterly, 18 (4), 427-451.

Mohr, J. (2001). Marketing of High-Technology Products and Innovations (Prentice Hall ed.):Prentice Hall.

Repo, P., Hyvonen, K., Pantzar, M., & Timonen, P. (2004). Users inventing ways to enjoy newmobile services - the case of watching mobile videos. System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on , 8 pp.-8 pp.

Silverman, D. (2001). Intrepreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction (2nd ed.): Sage Publications Ltd.

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do too many chefs spoil the broth: customer involvement in mobile handset development

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