Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
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Really new products frequently receive great academic, managerial and public attention, because they have the potential to change everybody’s lives. Our economic system fundamentally relies on creative destruction, i.e. the constant process by which innovations challenge established products. This tension between the new and the already existing in the end promises competitive advantage, but makes it difficult to successfully introduce product innovations to the market. Hence, companies strive to become better all along the innovation process, ranging from idea generation, to product launch, and customers’ post-adoption product experience. This dissertation addresses challenges along the product innovation process in three independent essays.
Essay 1 focuses on members’ collaboration behavior in innovation forums. Many innovations at first are invented by users and later on get developed into products ready for the consumer market within firms’ R&D departments. Users are often the first to encounter novel needs and come up with ideas, concepts and even prototypes to satisfy them. Online forums are social spheres where hobbyists and professionals from all over the world meet to exchange their ideas about products and share their latest experiences. Hence, online forums represent incredibly rich resources to inspire companies’ ideation processes. Essay 1 investigates the social mechanism of member collaboration in innovation communities. Theory on creativity postulates that the interaction between the core and the periphery of social networks enables the communities’ innovative performance. Recent research showed that members from the periphery can boost their individual innovative performance via exchanging with the community core. However, we still do not know why core members assist peripherals. Essay 1 reveals that core members benefit from exchanging with members from the periphery throughout increasing their own influence as experts among peers in the core. The identified mechanism can be used to select the right candidates for co-creation workshops.
Essay 2 identifies a product launch strategy for innovations which are both, radical and disruptive. The successful launch of radical and disruptive innovations is a difficult challenge, because their radical newness provokes consumers’ uncertainties. Furthermore, because of their disruptiveness, at the time of product launch those innovations are perceived to be inferior regarding their primary functionality compared to established products, although their performance in general is fully sufficient to satisfy consumers’ actual needs. A means to address the perceived inferiority is to add a feature to the innovation which offers a functional surplus by means of existing technology. Essay 2 shows that simultaneously introducing the innovation and a functionally modified version thereof increases consumers’ adoption intentions. Furthermore, consumers who opted for the modified, but more expensive version are not dissatisfied with their choice in the long run, although they do not need the additional performance from an objective point of view. Essay 2 contributes insights regarding the causes and consequences of this new product launch strategy to the theory of radical and disruptive innovations. The findings of this essay are highly relevant to managers, because they show how this strategy can be implemented in practice to lower the failure rate of really new products at product launch.
Innovation research to date is rich on evidence regarding the determinants of consumers’ adoption decisions. However, perhaps due to questions of data accessibility, insights of consumers’ post-adoption product evaluation are still scarce. Hence, essay 3 shifts the focus beyond product adoption to investigate the interplay of early adopters’ experienced utility, perceived aesthetic value and attitude toward the product in the long-run. Findings show that the perceived aesthetic value creates a halo effect in the post-adoption phase, such that the influence of early adopters’ experienced utility on attitude gets weaker, the more positively they evaluate the innovations’ aesthetics over time. Furthermore, the halo effect only tempers the relationship between experienced hedonic utility and attitude when consumers are characterized by innate consumer innovativeness. Managers should see the products’ form not only as a means to increase purchase intentions, but understand that aesthetic value offers the potential to shape consumers’ long term attitude toward the product, which in turn is an important driver for word of mouth behavior. A high score on the trait innate consumer innovativeness is an appropriate criterion for the selection of users for design co-creation.