A system of customer co-creation for new product development of digital products with a pilot study of the Swiss media industry

Abstract

In the age of digitisation, the media industry is faced with declining advertising revenues. Therefore, the focus on the development of new digital products is a key element to survive in such a fast-changing market and to increase the innovation performance. One of the most important elements thereby is the involvement of customers as co-creators in the new product development (NPD) process, so that new digital products are developed that are in demand on the market. However, the process of how companies turn external knowledge from customers into knowledge creation for generating new ideas and the development of innovative products has not been analysed. This pilot study, which presents an initial system of customer co-creation for NPD of digital products from the literature and searches for similarities and dissimilarities through an abductive qualitative data analysis from interviews with three managers in three different Swiss media companies, explores this unresolved research gap. The system of this study is based on an overarching phase model, which is derived from Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). The process anchored in it, which focuses on the customer co-creation of digital products, integrates process elements from the two user-centered approaches, namely User Centered Design (UCD) and Design Thinking (DT). The results from the interviews show that the system is largely in line with the NPD process procedures in the three media companies. It was found that customers can be involved everywhere in the NPD process, but that this is not yet implemented in practice. However, as the future ambition in media companies is to become even more customer- centric, the proposed system in this study is very promising.