An Agenda for Future Research on IT and Product Development - Information Technology and Product Development - page 191

programs, product knowledge centers, idea rating systems, and community man-
ager roles. Future studies that focus on identifying and evaluating the potential
effectiveness of such organizational mechanisms could offer invaluable insights to
companies in ensuring that their customer co-innovation initiatives add value to the
business.
However, to be really effective, customer co-innovation platforms would need
to be integrated with the organization's broader innovation system and processes
too , and this forms the fourth topic. To leverage the innovative ideas and solutions
offered by customers, they need to be acted upon. And, this requires integrating
the customer co-innovation initiative with the remainder of the company's innova-
tion engine. Future studies that focus on this issue would need to adopt a broader
perspective and examine what elements of the organization's innovation process
infrastructure would need to be adapted to integrate them with the IT platform. For
example, this might imply different processes to evaluate ideas that originate from
customers. Similarly, this might also imply engaging with customer innovators as
some of those ideas move through the company's product development pipeline.
Thus, future research on identifying and evaluating such process accommodations
to bind together the company's customer co-innovation initiative with other parts of
the internal innovation system assume critical importance.
Finally, studies should also conduct rigorous empirical examination of the impact
of IT-based platforms for customer co-innovation . As noted previously, much of
the early literature in this area has focused on establishing the potential for IT to
enhance the nature and scope of customer engagement in innovation and value cre-
ation. However, there has been limited number of empirical studies on this topic.
Importantly, IT platforms for customer co-innovation can have both direct and indi-
rect impact (Nambisan & Nambisan, 2008). The direct impact would likely be on
the effectiveness of the company's innovation - in terms of innovation cost, time,
and quality. The indirect impact would be on the company's relationship with cus-
tomers as well as customer perceptions regarding the product, brand, etc. (e.g.,
brand image). It is important that companies deploying IT platforms for customer
co-innovation are aware of these different outcomes and as such empirical studies
that focus on this issue could offer valuable and timely insights.
10.3 Conclusions
The objective of this topic has been to discuss a wide range of issues related to the
application of IT to support product and service development. The four broad topics
identified in this chapter as well as the varied issues discussed in the earlier chapters
together lay out a rich and highly promising agenda for future research in the area
of IT and product/service development. Importantly, the discussions in the various
chapters have also highlighted the significance of adopting a broad inter-disciplinary
perspective and drawing on theoretical concepts and frameworks from varied areas
for pursuing such a research agenda.