The following was the second sub-question (RQ2) formulated: How and why do particular customer involvement forms differ in portfolio-level service development? As a response to the question, this study showed that customer involvement forms were variously applied across the offering development modes and yielded different contributions within specific offering development modes. Comparison of the customer involvement forms across offering development modes revealed clear differences between the customer involvement forms (i.e., customers as knowledge contributors, co-developers, and innovators) and between specific customer knowledge forms (i.e., needs, feedback, and ideas). Thus, this study responded to a
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generic call for research to better understand the applicability of different customer involvement forms (Cui and Wu, 2017, 2016; Witell, et al., 2011) by showing how and why customer involvement forms differ vis-à-vis industrial offering development modes.
The study illustrated that when customers were familiar with the content of what was developed, they were able to provide explicit and rich feedback and were able to explicitly describe their needs. This was applicable especially to developing basic services and customer service elements. In turn, when customers were not as familiar with the content of development, as in extending portfolios with advanced services, the value of customer knowledge contributions was much lower. Moreover, the study did not find the role of the customers to be significant in idea generation in any of the offering development modes. Co-development, in contrast, emerged as a desired approach in certain modes, especially in developing more complete offerings as well as extending portfolios with advanced services (see, 4.6 for a complete findings summary).
The findings of this study are aligned with those of prior studies, which suggest that different customer involvement forms have their own advantages and are suitable for different conditions (Cui and Wu, 2017; Witell, et al., 2011). Using customers as a knowledge source, for example, through traditional market research, is regarded to function better when customer needs are not latent but spoken and clear (Witell, et al., 2011). Moreover, it is known that a lot of the knowledge that originates from customers relates to the existing services and products and is therefore likely to support incremental changes (Blazevic and Lievens, 2008). The findings of the present study support this view to some extent. In the boundaries of this study, much of the customer-provided knowledge (e.g., needs and feedback) considered currently supplied services, related customer service elements, or how the existing services were combined into packages or solutions without radical changes. Therefore, much of the emerged customer contributions were likely to drive incremental changes.
Regarding customers as a source for new ideas, the findings did not support the view that customers are a valuable source of information that could provide, for example, more original ideas than those originating from inside the firm (see, Kristensson, et al., 2002; Magnusson, et al., 2003). In contrast, the study found that in addition to ideating radically new services, customers’ role in idea generation was sparse throughout the offering development modes. A lack of specific idea generation methods (see, Edvardsson, et al., 2012) may at least partly explain this because none of the focal firms were particularly focused on ideating new services
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with customers. Moreover, the findings did not indicate any differences between the offering development modes in that regard.
This study also demonstrated that co-development could provide highly valuable knowledge, especially for developing more complete offerings and extending portfolios with advanced services. Earlier research has suggested co-development-based approaches to overcome some weaknesses of using customers as a knowledge source in service development (Edvardsson, et al., 2006). In particular, earlier research has pointed out that traditional market research techniques can be insufficient in understanding latent customer needs (Edvardsson, et al., 2006; Witell, et al., 2011) and produce less innovative ideas and knowledge (Blazevic and Lievens, 2008; Mahr, et al., 2014; Witell, et al., 2011). In particular, with advanced services, the identified benefits of co-development followed this logic as customer participation in service development was expected to help in the identification of the latent needs by giving customers an opportunity to provide feedback in the early stages (see, Alam, 2002, 2006; Chang and Taylor, 2016; Witell, et al., 2014).
In developing more complete offerings, this study discovered that some customers pursued development partnerships with the focal firms and sought to influence how the focal firms cooperated with customers in that regard. These customers were found to be key customers to the focal firms, and they showed at least some lead-user characteristics (see, Franke, et al., 2006; von Hippel, 1986;
Lüthje and Herstatt, 2004). Even though the study could not prove that these customer were actual lead users by showing that their needs become general in future (von Hippel, 1986), it showed that they were both qualified and willing to contribute in the development of more complete offerings (see, Lüthje and Herstatt, 2004). The roots of the lead-user method are in product development (Sandén, Matthing, et al., 2006); however, the current study showed that the approach is particularly suitable for industrial service setting and especially for advancing development partnerships (see, Gebauer, 2008). Moreover, the current study revealed that customers can be the active party in pushing the cooperation forward and can actively seek a lead-user position by themselves, thus showing that finding lead users is not necessarily a challenge in the industrial service setting even though it has been regarded as a weakness of the method in general (see, Edvardsson, et al., 2012).
The role of customers as innovators (see, Cui and Wu, 2016) was non-existent in the present study. An explanation for this could be that innovation toolkits, online innovation communities, and open software communities that enable customers to innovate themselves (Antikainen, 2011; von Hippel and Katz, 2002; Nambisan, 2002) typically represent the vanguard in service development. However, the
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industrial service business does not usually represent the front line of service innovation. Alternatively, developing services is not always the primary focus of industrial companies, and this could have delayed investments in advanced customer involvement tools or platforms.