An Agenda for Future Research on IT and Product Development - Information Technology and Product Development - page 190

be very beneficial to companies as they explore different types of experiments in
innovation.
10.2.4 IT Platforms for Customer Co-innovation
and Value Co-creation
As noted elsewhere in this topic, the notion of customer (or user) innovation is not
new. Eric von Hippel's (1988) research over the years has led to numerous insights
on how lead users can make significant contribution to product improvements as
well as to the creation of new products/services. However, with the emergence
of the Internet and other information and communication technologies, the scope
and the depth of customer (user) involvement in innovation and value creation has
undergone radical change.
As discussed in detail in Chapter 3, IT-based platforms (or virtual customer
environments) have “democratized” innovation activities in many industries. While
the early studies on this topic (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2003; Nambisan, 2002;
Nambisan & Baron, 2007; Nambisan & Nambisan, 2008; Sawhney, Verona, &
Prandelli, 2005; Thomke & von Hippel, 2002) have offered critical insights on the
different types of such IT-based platforms and on the strategies and practices to
enhance customers' motivation to contribute to innovation initiatives, several other
important research issues remain to be investigated.
In particular, there are four broad topics that future studies may focus on. The
first topic relates to the need for coherence in devising IT-based platforms for host-
ing customer co-innovation and value co-creation activities . In recent years, many
companies have implemented several different social media technologies (blogs,
wikis, online communities, etc.) to support their interactions with customers. In
most cases, however, different parts of the organization have adopted or deployed
different technology platforms to interact with customers. As a consequence, at
the enterprise level there is often very little coherence among these different cus-
tomer co-innovation initiatives. Thus, an important topic for future research in this
area relates to how companies can bring coherence to the design and deployment
of these IT-based platforms. In addressing this issue, there is much potential for
drawing on theoretical concepts and insights from different related areas including
computer-mediated communication, user innovation, and social media. A desired
outcome of such studies would be a theoretically-grounded framework that could
guide the selection and integration of varied IT components to support different
types of customer co-innovation activities.
The second topic is related to the establishment of complementary organizational
mechanisms to support and enhance the capabilities offered by the IT platform .
While IT platforms do enable companies to interact with customers, it will require
more than just a set of communication tools for such interactions to be effec-
tive. Specifically, companies would need to deploy organizational mechanisms
to complement those tools and technologies. These include customer recognition