A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Sabina Şeran
trying new approaches, but they do not know that the key element of the strategy is called a
“prosumer” or that its potential can be used differently depending on the company’s activity domain
and objectives. For that reason, we need to have a clear image of the prosumer’s characteristics and
the company’s purpose, followed by asking these questions:
� To what extent we focus on the prosumer and on the company’s objectives?
� Which will be the level of creativity allowed?
� To what extent we involve the prosumer?
� In what area do we leave the prosumer with the involvement opportunity and in what stage of the
product’s life cycle?
After responding to the first two questions, the firm will be situated in one of the following four
categories, presented in Figure 2 from below: Company + Company (customization), Company +
Prosumer (crowd sourcing), Prosumer + Company (working together) and Prosumer + Prosumer (cocreation).
After the manager gets a clear picture of his firm’s position in the Prosumer Creativity and
Focus Paradigm, he will respond to the next two questions, for building an effective future marketing
strategy.
The desire to delineate the method the company must involve its prosumers in innovative activities for
meeting the markets needs and wants, the research undertaken led to the paradigm presented in
Figure 2, which has two axes. The vertical axis measures the prosumer’s participation degree in
product or service achievement, either with the emphasis on the company’s objectives, the main
beneficiary of the strategy or on the prosumer’s needs, in this case, the consumer has the maximum
gain. The horizontal axis measures the creativity degree allowed for prosumer activities. This is
proportional with innovation. The higher the level of creativity, the more efficient innovation is
produced, and the strategy is a success. The higher the freedom of the prosumer, the more product
performance will be obtained.
Figure 2: The prosumer creativity and focus paradigm
The four strategies will be explained in the following, being divided into two categories, depending on
the focus function on the company or on the prosumer. This classification has the purpose to better
understand the existing connections between the strategies of the paradigm’s base and top, each with
its different meanings.
Therefore, the focus on company’s resources and objectives knows two marketing strategies
(Figure3) with varied competitive results: product customization and crowd sourcing.
335