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Master thesis Business Administration, Specialization: Strategy & Organization 04 Supervisor: CASE Prof. Dr. T. Elfring ANALYSIS Introduction § 4.1 | Case Analysis: Company A -‐ E § 4.2 | Cross-‐case analysis Joost de Boer Student number 1517597 This chapter presents the findings of the empirical research that was done among five service-‐based organizations in The Netherlands. A total number of fourteen semi-‐structured, qualitative interviews were held with employees working at these organizations. Starting with a within-‐case analysis per organization, a description and interpretation is made of how each organization uses co-‐creation in their NPD-‐process. Next, all five organizations are compared with each other in a cross-‐case analysis, using the conceptual model that was proposed in Chapter 2 as a guiding line. Definition of co-‐creation The interviewees defined co-‐creation as follows: it is the “involvement of stakeholders at a certain moment in time by creating a dialogue about organizational processes or topics together with the organization, in order to create a shared added value”. Appendix B shows an overview of the different interviewees and how they define co-‐creation; this section shortly discusses their definitions and considerations when referring to co-creation. Some of the interviewees managed to give a definition of one or two sentences; others used a more comprehensive explanation. It appeared that there is still a lot of discussion on what co-‐creation exactly is, what it should be used for and how it should be used, immediately highlighting the relevance of this research. The first item of discussion was about the question of who to co-‐create with. Is an organization only co-‐creating with its customers, or can it also be done with employees and other stakeholders? And having concluded with who to co-‐create, what should co-‐creation be used for? Where one participant found its use to be in the innovation of new products and the development of existing ones, others found that it could also be used internally to start a dialogue between people inside the organization. Agreement was found in the description that co-‐creation stands for ‘doing something together’. However, the question ‘together with whom?’ resulted in different answers. The interviewees of Company B immediately and solely referred to ‘customers’ or ‘the target population’, as would Company E. Company A did the same, however it also referred to the possibility of co-‐creating internally by not involving customers, but employees. Company C, which operates solely in a B2B-‐environment, mostly referred to ‘external parties’, in a very broad sense. They emphasized not only the co-‐creation with direct customers, but also with the entire value chain of the industries they and their customers were operating in. Company D, finally, widened the scope of co-creation to a maximum, by bringing in specialists and experts, as well as ‘the public’. For the purpose of this analysis, it is sufficient to answer the who-‐question in general with ‘stakeholders’. In addition, a number of participants were asked whether they considered co-‐creation as something new or as something they or their organizations were already familiar with, such as focus groups. Most of them found that the concept of cooperation and creation with customers, together with the organization, was something 33
Master thesis Business Administration, Specialization: Strategy & Organization Supervisor: Prof. Dr. T. Elfring Joost de Boer Student number 1517597 that had been done for years. However, they distinguished two characteristics: first, co-‐creation enabled them to involve customers at an earlier stage in the process. Second, the use of new technologies, such as social media and Web 2.0, provided organizations with a tool to start a dialogue with external parties in a total new way. Finally, when discussing what exactly could be co-‐created, most participants would not go further than speaking of ‘development of products and services’. From this perspective, there was no direct lead in how the involved parties (the who) and the moment and topic of co-‐creation (the what) should be translated into the process of innovation through co-‐creation. Participants referred differently to the moment in the development process (‘every stadium of the process’) or its purpose (‘idea generation’ or ‘mainly for testing purposes’). This will become clearer in the next paragraph, where the actual use of co-‐creation in the organization is discussed.. § 4.1 CASE ANALYSIS § 4.1.1 | Case analysis: Company A Purpose of co-‐creation One of the interviewees in Company A indicated that one main of the reasons to introduce co-‐creation was to involve customers in the creation of new products, hoping to create an internal basis of support for certain ideas. In addition, another interviewee explained that it was also used to get closer in the minds of customers and to reconsider what Company A’s added value is for its customers. For these reasons, customers were mostly involved in the organization’s innovation process to generate ideas for new service propositions and to discover (new) business opportunities for Company A. Here, co-‐creation was often preceded by context mapping, a technique to that helps to ‘map’ the product context by researching its user-‐context. The exact focus and scope tended to change over several projects. Sometimes, a participant told, there were greenfield-‐like sessions, characterized by a very broad scope and little focus, leaving participants with much freedom, but also few handles and direction on where to go to. Other sessions were led very specific by its content, providing clear directions about the kind of solution that Company A was looking for: “having clear directions brings the advantage of knowing what you will do and what you will not do during a session”. One important similarity among the projects, is that complicated technical and legal problems are not used as input for the co-‐creation sessions: “some of these things are highly complex, and are therefore not interesting for co-creational purposes”. After a period of trial and error, a participant remarks: “when it comes to clarity in the project, it is very important to set concrete goals and to be specific in what we ask of the participants in a co-‐creation session”. But besides setting concrete goals and making sure the scope of the project is narrowed down to a workable level, time pressure that comes with a co-‐creation session (a co-‐creation session normally only takes one day) was also believed to increases productivity. 34
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