<p>Given today’s industry dynamics, new service development is becoming increasingly important to the competitiveness, growth, and survival of organizations. Unfortunately, new service development has proven to be a complex and difficult task. Numerous reasons are stated in the literature such as the difficulty of understanding and anticipating latent customer needs and insufficient market research techniques. To facilitate proactive learning about the customer, recent findings stress customer involvement in the development process and observations of customers in real action.</p><p>The overall objective of the dissertation is to contribute to an increased knowledge of customer involvement, i.e., the role of customers as contributors and co-creators in new service development. The thesis draws on theory from market and learning orientation in conjunction with a service-centered model, and provides an extensive review of literature on customer involvement in innovation. In five separate studies, this doctor’s thesis addresses the customer’s role in innovation activities in various industries (e.g., Staffing Services, Airline Services, and Mobile Telecommunication services).</p><p>In this thesis it is argued that interaction is not only the focal point of services, but also the essence of customer involvement. A special emphasis is put on supporting techniques as these are the means by which customer information and knowledge are created. In addition, results are provided showing that customer involvement in innovation pays off. Companies that engage in collaborative innovation with customers can expect improved customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profit margin.</p>

Problemformulering: I och med kundens roll i värdeskapandet måste företag få kunskap i hur deras kunder kan involveras, och även utveckla formella processer för det. I och med tjänsternas allt större roll i världen krävs en ständig utveckling av teorier kring området. Forskning kring tjänsteutveckling har vidare mestadels bara har bidragit till det teoretiska området och inte gett något större bidrag till de som faktiskt arbetar med tjänsteutveckling i praktiken i dagsläget. De här aspekterna är några av de faktorer som ledde fram till studiens syfte. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att förstå hur kunder involveras i tjänsteutveckling i praktiken och hur deras roll ser ut i utvecklingsprocessen, samt att undersöka kopplingen mellan tillvägagångssätten i praktiken jämfört med vad som står i teorin. Metod: Studiens metod är av en kvalitativ karaktär med en fallstudiedesign. Tack vare nio stycken semistrukturerade intervjuer med både tjänstedesignbyråer och tjänsteföretag som arbetar med kundinvolvering kunde värdefull data samlas in och ge en förklaring kring ”fallet”. Slutsats: De slutsatser som har kunnat dras utifrån studien är till att börja med att de traditionella tjänsteutvecklingsmodellerna har fasats ut till förmån för designmodeller med iterativa faser. Det visade sig även att en sådan uppdelning av kunder som återfinns i teorin, inte är aktuell i praktiken, utan baseras snarare på behov än egenskaper. Slutligen kunde, förutom de traditionella effekterna av kundinvolvering, en annan typ av effekt identifieras. Nämligen att kundinvolvering kan leda till stora organisationsförändringar på grund av ett nytt kundfokus. / Problem: Given the role of the customer in value creation organizations need knowledge on how their customers can get involved, and develop formal processes to do so. Given services role in today’s world there is a need for continuous research and development in the field. Furthermore, the research surrounding service development has mostly contributed to the theoretical field without much contribution to those who work with service development today. These aspects are part of the reasoning leading up to this studies purpose. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding on how customers are involved in service development in practice and the role of the customer in the development process, as well as examine the practice with the current literature. Method: The study is of a qualitative character with a case study design. Due to nine semi-structured interviews with both service design firms and service businesses both working with customer involvement in their service development processes valuable data could be collected to explain the case. Conclusion: The conclusions that were made from the study is that the traditional service development models have been phased out in favor of design based models with iterative phases. Furthermore, the theoretical classification of a services user is not as widespread in practice, it is more based on the needs of the customer than the customer’s characteristics. Finally, the study could identify that besides the traditional effects of customer involvement, there is an additional effect. Namely, that customer involvement can lead to large organizational changes as a result of a new customer focus.

<p>Project evaluation is concerned with indicators setting and performance tracking along the life of a project. It plays an essential role to the success of any project and therefore demands special attention. At the heart of this process lies a system of criteria one has to take into account when performing the evaluation. Our thesis considers this problem in a particular context, namely New Service Development (NSD) projects. The topic is of our interest because innovation (hence NSD) has become an inherent aspect of service industry while the research dedicated to NSD project evaluation is rather limited. Our thesis aims at understanding the purposes, the process of evaluating NSD projects and pointing out specific criteria included during the evaluation of NSD projects. As a result, the research question pursuing is: ‘What are key Evaluation Criteria for New Service Development projects?’ From the literature review on project evaluation and new service development, our study reveals a list of eight important criteria of evaluation. This consists of three financial criteria: (1) profitability, (2) production cost, (3) return on investment; and five non-financial criteria: (4) strategic fit, (5) marketing criteria, (6) corporate social responsibilities, (7) information quality, and (8) facilitating factors. From empirical perspective, qualitative approach is applied to collect data through three case studies and a series of semi-structured interviews with seventeen respondents in Albania, Italy, Sweden and Vietnam, from companies offering various types of service. The case studies build comprehensive understanding on the process of new service development, of project evaluation for NSD whereas interviews check the transferability of the three cases and identify evaluation criteria employed in practice. The empirical results were analyzed in comparison with the arguments found from literature. Regarding the research question, the study found that the set of evaluation criteria collected from empirical study fits with the list of eight criteria proposed by literature. Among this set, two main criteria ‘strategic fit’ (4) and ‘customer satisfaction’ which is apart of ‘marketing criteria’ (5) are recommended as ‘must’ for the evaluation process on any type of NSD project. Findings of this research contribute to the existing knowledge provided by both academic and practitioners regarding both project management field and new service development area, by suggesting a set of key criteria that should be used as guidance in order to succeed with evaluation of NSD projects.</p>

User involvement has, during recent years, become something of a mantra among product development managers. However, the existing literature has not much to say about how the individual user contributes to product innovation and whether her or his contribution is valuable.  The thesis attempts to fill this gap in knowledge by reporting experiments in which ordinary users are asked to suggest new services that their mobile telephones could deliver. The originality, user value, and the feasibility of their suggestions are then compared to the suggestions of professional product designers. On the whole, the users contribute ideas that are more original, and that could result in services of higher user value than the professionals.  Exactly how the users are involved matters for the outcome of their involvement. Two different approaches to involving users are identified, Guided Users and Pioneering Users. The Guided User approach seems to be preferable when stepwise refinement of an existing service is desired.  The Pioneering User approach is better suited to supporting radical innovation. The conclusion is that firms must adapt their processes of developing new products in order to realise the full potential of user involvement. / Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003

Given today’s industry dynamics, new service development is becoming increasingly important to the competitiveness, growth, and survival of organizations. Unfortunately, new service development has proven to be a complex and difficult task. Numerous reasons are stated in the literature such as the difficulty of understanding and anticipating latent customer needs and insufficient market research techniques. To facilitate proactive learning about the customer, recent findings stress customer involvement in the development process and observations of customers in real action. The overall objective of the dissertation is to contribute to an increased knowledge of customer involvement, i.e., the role of customers as contributors and co-creators in new service development. The thesis draws on theory from market and learning orientation in conjunction with a service-centered model, and provides an extensive review of literature on customer involvement in innovation. In five separate studies, this doctor’s thesis addresses the customer’s role in innovation activities in various industries (e.g., Staffing Services, Airline Services, and Mobile Telecommunication services). In this thesis it is argued that interaction is not only the focal point of services, but also the essence of customer involvement. A special emphasis is put on supporting techniques as these are the means by which customer information and knowledge are created. In addition, results are provided showing that customer involvement in innovation pays off. Companies that engage in collaborative innovation with customers can expect improved customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profit margin.

Project evaluation is concerned with indicators setting and performance tracking along the life of a project. It plays an essential role to the success of any project and therefore demands special attention. At the heart of this process lies a system of criteria one has to take into account when performing the evaluation. Our thesis considers this problem in a particular context, namely New Service Development (NSD) projects. The topic is of our interest because innovation (hence NSD) has become an inherent aspect of service industry while the research dedicated to NSD project evaluation is rather limited. Our thesis aims at understanding the purposes, the process of evaluating NSD projects and pointing out specific criteria included during the evaluation of NSD projects. As a result, the research question pursuing is: ‘What are key Evaluation Criteria for New Service Development projects?’ From the literature review on project evaluation and new service development, our study reveals a list of eight important criteria of evaluation. This consists of three financial criteria: (1) profitability, (2) production cost, (3) return on investment; and five non-financial criteria: (4) strategic fit, (5) marketing criteria, (6) corporate social responsibilities, (7) information quality, and (8) facilitating factors. From empirical perspective, qualitative approach is applied to collect data through three case studies and a series of semi-structured interviews with seventeen respondents in Albania, Italy, Sweden and Vietnam, from companies offering various types of service. The case studies build comprehensive understanding on the process of new service development, of project evaluation for NSD whereas interviews check the transferability of the three cases and identify evaluation criteria employed in practice. The empirical results were analyzed in comparison with the arguments found from literature. Regarding the research question, the study found that the set of evaluation criteria collected from empirical study fits with the list of eight criteria proposed by literature. Among this set, two main criteria ‘strategic fit’ (4) and ‘customer satisfaction’ which is apart of ‘marketing criteria’ (5) are recommended as ‘must’ for the evaluation process on any type of NSD project. Findings of this research contribute to the existing knowledge provided by both academic and practitioners regarding both project management field and new service development area, by suggesting a set of key criteria that should be used as guidance in order to succeed with evaluation of NSD projects.

For a retailer, who has a close and everyday contact with its customers, understanding the customers can be of benefit if they know how to use the information in the right way. One way of using the customer is to integrate customers when developing new services, to enhance the possibility of the new service gaining market acceptance. Customer insight, Omnichannel retailing and Big Data are areas that recently have caught the interest of retailers. The latter two are of interest as these provide retailers with better possibilities of gaining customer insight, by taking the opportunities to observe the customers’ virtual footsteps to a whole new level. This thesis is a study made with the market research company Nepa as employer of the thesis, in order to develop their B2B offer with end-customer integration. Why and how customers are integrated were further studied through the frame of reference. The factors that were chosen to describe from a theoretical standpoint how customers can be integrated were type of integration, role of the customer, type of customer and timing of the integration. The underlying factors that were chosen to answer why retailers choose different alternatives among the above mentioned factors were market orientation, service/goods dominant logic, environmental uncertainty and market maturity. The study was made with a qualitative, positivistic approach using a collective case study. The case study is a good way to be able to answer both how and why-questions and was therefore chosen as method. By investigating multiple cases and performing a cross case analysis the authors were able to draw more generalizable conclusions. Five retailers took part in the study and for each of these a developed service was chosen as case for investigation. By doing low structured interviews using a method called story-telling, the authors let the respondents from each company speak freely about the chosen case, and that information could then be analyzed. The conclusions of the study concern the different ways retailers choose to integrate customers and the reasons they do it in different ways. A company’s market orientation affects if and what type of customer integration is used in the idea-generating phases. The degree of market orientation also affects the amount of occasions and what type of customer integration is used in the execution-oriented phases. Retailers’ turbulent technology environment has influenced their general perception of risk and the risk of unacceptance with the specific project. This results in that a company can initially integrate customers proactively to let them guide the company or the company can consider customer integration to be secondary. Retailers generally are guided by a goods dominant logic which leads to them not choosing to integrate the customers in active roles in the innovation process. Instead, the retailers combine different integration techniques to gain some of the advantages that active customer could have brought. This is also connected to the retailers wanting to get quickly through the early phases of the process and instead use agile development after the launch of the service. The retailers do not choose different types of customers for integration, but the combination of integration techniques can still provide them with some of the characteristics of the more knowledgeable customer.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003. / Härtill 6 uppsatser.

There is an increasing pressure on service firms to innovate and compete on new offerings. As our lives become more digitized through the ubiquitous connectivity by the usage of digital devices, companies are now able to collect vast amount of various data in real-time, and thus, know radically more about their customers. Companies could leverage on this growing body of data and developing relevant services based on customer demands accordingly. One industry compelled to benefit by utilizing customer information is the telecom industry due to fierce competition and a need of innovation in a saturated market. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate how telecom companies use customer information in their development process of new services by answering the research question: How do telecom companies use customer information within their New Service Development process? To illuminate this, a qualitative research was conducted on three Swedish telecom companies. The findings indicate that telecom companies possess a beneficial position since they are able to collect a vast amount of data about their customers due to the digital nature of their services. However, they struggle to efficiently integrate the data and seamlessly disseminate the obtained knowledge internally. Hence, leveraging customer information in new service development has not reached its full potential and how well it is incorporated is determined by the skills of key employees and their collaboration rather than deployed internal processes.

Submitted by Marlene Santos (marlene.bc.ufg@gmail.com) on 2016-04-04T21:12:54Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Luciana Padovez Cualheta - 2015.pdf: 1603506 bytes, checksum: 640fe4870b9279aeeca49723b2392ea9 (MD5) license_rdf: 19874 bytes, checksum: 38cb62ef53e6f513db2fb7e337df6485 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-04-05T11:13:29Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Luciana Padovez Cualheta - 2015.pdf: 1603506 bytes, checksum: 640fe4870b9279aeeca49723b2392ea9 (MD5) license_rdf: 19874 bytes, checksum: 38cb62ef53e6f513db2fb7e337df6485 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-05T11:13:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Luciana Padovez Cualheta - 2015.pdf: 1603506 bytes, checksum: 640fe4870b9279aeeca49723b2392ea9 (MD5) license_rdf: 19874 bytes, checksum: 38cb62ef53e6f513db2fb7e337df6485 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-30 / The air transport sector is highly relevant to the global economy and has grown about six times the global GDP in recent years. Nevertheless, it has not been able to generate the desired profitability, due to high costs and the inability to deliver differentiated services to customers. In this context, innovation in services is a priority. This study aimed to identify what are the main practices in the new service development process (NSDP) for companies in the air transport industry. Several NSDP practices are identified in the literature which make up a conceptual model. By conducting multiple case studies and comparing the results with the literature, ten of those practices are found to be recurrent in the air transport industry. They are: analyzing the external environment, analysis of the financial capacity of the company, the creation of support activities, the new service price definition, employee training, adaptation of the physical structure, the disclosure of the new service, disclosure of the benefits of the new service for the customer, obtaining customer feedback and the comparison of actual costs versus planned costs. Future research should try to understand how and why those activities occur. / O setor de serviços de transporte aéreo é altamente relevante para a economia global e tem crescido cerca de seis vezes mais que o PIB mundial nos últimos anos. Apesar disso, o setor não tem sido capaz de gerar a rentabilidade desejada devido aos altos custos e a incapacidade de entregar um serviço diferenciado ao cliente. Nesse contexto, a inovação em serviços tornase prioritária. O presente estudo teve como objetivo identificar quais são as principais práticas do processo de desenvolvimento de um novo serviço (PDNS) para empresas do setor de transporte aéreo. Para tanto, são identificadas as práticas de PDNS propostas na literatura, que compõem um modelo conceitual. Através da condução de estudos de casos múltiplos e da comparação dos seus resultados com a literatura, identificou-se que dez dessas práticas são recorrentes para as empresas do setor de transporte aéreo, sendo elas a análise do ambiente externo, análise da capacidade financeira da empresa, a criação de atividades de suporte, a definição do preço do novo serviço, o treinamento dos funcionários, a adaptação da estrutura física da empresa, a divulgação do novo serviço, evidenciação dos benefícios do novo serviço para o cliente, a obtenção de feedback dos clientes e a comparação dos custos realizados versus o planejado. Sugere-se que pesquisas futuras busquem compreender como e porque cada uma dessas práticas é realizada, ampliando a compreensão acerca do assunto