Tibor Dőry

Innovation and excellence

Management methods for innovation transformation

The user-dominated innovation process

Companies implementing innovation processes have a fundamental interest in cooperating and communicating with the future users of their developments. However, not all developers are open to early cooperation with their customers, which can be very time-consuming. Why is it worth researching the needs of customers who are often demanding or selective? How could the buyer know better than the manufacturer of a given product what needs to be (further) developed? Fortunately, thanks to the research of von Hippel, among others, we have long known the importance of so-called lead users, i.e. early adopters, in innovation processes, alongside ordinary users. The renowned professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of the first to argue for the importance of early communication with customers and developer collaboration.

A series of examples documented in the literature show that new products or services that consume significant amounts of money are unable to satisfy all the needs of users, who in many cases further develop, supplement, modify the purchased products or even develop completely new solutions according to their own needs. User involvement can be seen as an important tool for increasing innovation efforts and activities and mitigating market uncertainties and risks. We consider users to be those who directly benefit from the use of a particular product or service. The category of users includes end users, intermediaries, and businesses or individuals (Bogers et al., 2010; Franke, 2014).

User-driven innovations have always existed, but their significance has gained new momentum in the age of the internet. Different creative users can easily connect with each other, and information related to innovations is quickly and cheaply accessible. Systematic literature reviews from the 2000s onwards show that researchers and practitioners of the innovation process are paying increasing attention to user contributions to innovations implemented by various businesses.

Ooi-Husted (2016) identified the following four main trends: i) the economic significance of user innovation, ii) relationships between users and businesses, iii) users' motivation to implement innovations and share their experiences with other users and manufacturers, and iv) characterisation of user innovation processes. With a focus on practical considerations, the Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management devotes a separate chapter to how businesses organise and utilise user innovation (Franke, 2014):

lead-user method: enables businesses to identify particularly attractive and radically new business opportunities for their users;
use of toolkits: individual users can design the product they want to purchase according to their own preferences.
crowdsourcing: open, online calls for solutions to specific corporate problems.

However, it should also be noted that there are important prerequisites for the exploitation of external and internal knowledge, and companies must have special capabilities in the form of processes, routines and established practical solutions. Internalisation, sharing and transfer of knowledge, especially knowledge outside the company, is not easy given its "tacit" nature (Ooi-Husted, 2016).

But what does this mean in practice? Consider a company whose employees are forced to modify a purchased machine or piece of equipment in order to finally be able to carry out a special machining or measuring process included in their production programme. They do this because they find it difficult to communicate their unusual requirements to the equipment manufacturer. In addition, they may have had negative experiences in the past, where even lengthy and complicated negotiations did not lead to the desired solution. In such cases, it is increasingly common for companies operating in a highly competitive environment and under time pressure to come up with and implement innovative solutions for their machines or equipment themselves, which we refer to as user innovation. We say that user innovation has certain conditions because the rigidity of classic corporate processes and their insufficiently flexible management make employees reluctant to engage in this type of innovation activity. All this can have a number of negative consequences for employee motivation, and more elegant or efficient solutions may remain on the shelf.

If we look at the case from the perspective of the manufacturer of the machine or equipment in the example above, we can say that they can only access user solutions if they develop appropriate processes to channel these innovations. It is important to have access to feedback and development suggestions from users of the sold machine or equipment, as well as innovation ideas, and to be able to pass these on to its own developers. This case shows how much cooperation and coordination of interests is needed to scale user innovations.

Another important aspect, and at the same time a serious management task, is to make tacit knowledge visible and usable. In theory and when reading the book, this seems much easier to achieve than it is in practice. It seems trivial to "just" listen to the innovative user, who may even be a machine operator, and pass on their problem or development suggestion to the right place. But where? To whom? And then what happens?

With these seemingly provocative but unresolved questions at many companies, we want to point out that there are a number of factors that can hinder the discovery and exploitation of user-related ("sticky") knowledge. This is especially true when we consider machine and equipment operators and front-line workers to be mere cogs in the machine and expect them only to carry out the instructions they are given. It is not much different from placing a suggestion box in the factory hall or canteen for revolutionary and less revolutionary ideas, and then nothing happens for a long time, the employee who made the suggestion receives no feedback, and the company does not allocate resources to implement the suggestions.

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 182 5

Menedzsment

The aim of the book "Innovation and Excellence" is to inspire and encourage company leaders, managers, and experts to initiate and implement innovation transformations with the help of professional literature and corporate case studies. Another important goal is to help develop the innovation capabilities of small and medium-sized enterprises in particular by sharing simple, proven management methods that can be tested in practice.

The first part of the volume reviews the factors of corporate excellence and success, then highlights the possible sources of innovation, with a focus on the role of users and employees. The empirical section presents a detailed description of the supportive role of the workplace environment and creative working conditions based on corporate case studies (AUDI, BOSCH, MELECS). The volume concludes with a description of selected tested practical methods and management techniques that readers can try out in their own businesses.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/dory-innovation-and-excellence//

BibTeX EndNote Mendeley Zotero