A Novel Virtual Design Platform for Product Innovation Through Customer Involvement

Involving customers in the product design process on a virtual design platform is thought to be an effective way for new product innovation. However, few studies have been carried out to co-relate the theories developed in marketing and those proposed for product design to develop a viable product innovation platform. There is no widely accepted integrated conceptual model that integrates these views. In the proposed model, a conceptual link between the marketing domain and the product domain construct a virtual design platform for customer's desired value co-creation and knowledge co-production. The different levels of involvers are classified according to three dimensions of customer demographics, customer psychographics and customer expertise based on the customer information derived from marketing segmentation theory. Products are categorized according to explicit product characteristics and virtual product characteristics. Measurement scales for each of these dimensions will be investigated thoroughly. A design process for product innovation based on the theoretical model is proposed. The framework connects customer information and product orientation to provide a novel platform for future product innovation.