A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Sabina Şeran
Figure 1: The four global characteristics of the prosumer
A complex prosumer can possess two or more of these above presented characteristics. Such an
individual could collaborate with companies like CRUSHPAD, for example, having the possibility of
creating its personal sort of wine (Producing + Consuming) and using professional mechanisms
(Professional + Consumer). This complex prosumer could have a passion for wines, a desire for
cultivating them, but not enough material resources or knowledge necessary for such an investment.
CRUSHPAD discovered this breach of uncovered needs and started an excellent business, which
provides their land, knowledge and expert tools for a certain fee, allowing passionate prosumers to
involve themselves directly in the harvesting, in the process of selecting seeds, realizing and bottling
the wine, building their own brand. This type of business is very successful, having 12, 5 million
dollars of profit, because its entrepreneur opened his mind and managed to take advantage from the
last decades’ changes.
Prosumers, limited in the real world by physical boundaries, have started to discover the online
environment’s business offers, invading this timeless and endless space, creating applications and
communities with an unprecedented level of freedom of speech. The authors have tried to include the
four characteristics of this concept in a single definition for the virtual prosumer, as “a knowledgeable
consumer, a digital user who employs technologies for participating to the product or service
conception, design and execution and who has a high impact on his social network” (Izvercianu and
Şeran, 2011).
Because prosumer specific characteristics are very important in the market, and its creative power
can start innovation in a company’s core, the authors have perceived as necessary to build the
Prosumer Creativity and Focus Paradigm.
3. The prosumer creativity and focus paradigm
The consumer, with his new role of co-producer of value, can be seen as an external partner in the
open innovation paradigm. Therefore, in an open innovation strategy, research and development are
seen as an open system, where ideas and external paths to the market can be as important as the
ones reserved for the internal ones (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2006). Boundaries
between a firm and its environment disappear in a world based on knowledge distribution. Companies
don’t afford to rely only on their own research and they start to appreciate the creative resources of
their stakeholders, especially of their consumers.
Since in the real world the innovation procedures are known and limited, companies have developed
their brands on the Internet. Firms that are realizing the innovative potential of the virtual prosumer
are developing even without being aware of them, four main marketing strategies. Managers are
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