A main challenge in new product development (NPD) is to match a new design to customer preferences. The better the fit between a product's design features and a user's preference set, the higher the perceived quality, and the lower the risk of an unsuccessful NPD project in form of a product flop. Recent reviews however show large failure rates in the commercialization of new designs. In most of the cases, the reason of failure has been not a lack of technological capability of the firm, but a wrong understanding of the real customer needs and demands. The reason is that customer need information often is sticky, difficult to explicit, and also frequently changes during the course of a longer NPD process.
The idea of this project is to investigate a new approach to reduce the NPD risk by postponing some design decisions into the customer domain. Following the successful example of open source software projects, which are characterized by high development flexibility and good fit of the design with the users' requirements, our idea is to develop a method which enables customers to directly transfer their needs into a product specification.
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In our concept of embedded open toolkits for user Innovation and co-design (in the following: "embedded toolkits"), a manufacturer designs a product with build-in flexibility by embedding knowledge and rules about possible product differentiations into the product. Customers then adapt a product to their needs after purchase. This process is supported by an intelligent interface that helps them to make these specifications.
The objective of this research is to study the feasibility of this concept in form of conceptual and experimental (empirical) work. The result of this project should be better knowledge of the contingency factors and the tactical and strategic implications of embedded toolkits. This project shall establish a research agenda to investigate the transfer open innovation principles from OSS Development to NPD process of complex physical products. Embedded toolkits are seen as a prime part of this structure.
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