Co-creation in Social Media Platforms: End-users as Innovation
Partners
Online Co-innovation within the Open Discovery Space
Wouter Vollenbroek
1
, Efthymios Constantinides
2
and Sjoerd de Vries
1
1
Department of Media, Communication & Organisation, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
2
School of Management and Governance, 7522 NB, Drienerlolaan 5, Enschede, The Netherlands
Keywords: Open Discovery Space, Social Media, Innovation, Co-creation, Online Co-innovation, Knowledge Media.
Abstract: Innovation is a way of meeting changing public needs by developing new and better solutions; it is also one
of the most extensively discussed issues in the academic literature and field practice. Changing students’
behaviour, increasing knowledge development, increasing parents’ involvement and new teaching methods
that overtake the existing methods creates a certain necessity to develop new knowledge media in
collaboration with all educational stakeholders. Under increasing competition and market pressure the
innovation process has been subject to important transformation during the last 30 years. Educational
publishers changed from being traditionally a “closed’, internal process, based on internal organisational
expertise and structures (R&D, New Product Department, New product Management etc.) the innovation
process is increasingly becoming externally oriented. Chesbrough (2003) popularized the trend of
externalizing the innovation process by engaging innovation partners in what he called the Open Innovation
model. With the explosion of the social media and the subsequent public empowerment the innovation
process is becoming a domain where the end-users and stakeholders are often directly involved (Prahalad
and Ramaswamy, 2004); Crowdsourcing and innovation with the end-users and stakeholders is becoming
the new innovation norm after closed- and open innovation. In this paper we identify this trend as Online
Co-Innovation and explain its main merits in relation to the implementation of the Open Discovery Space
project in the Netherlands.
1 INTRODUCTION
Innovation has been always praised as a means of
creating and maintaining competitive advantages
and is a basic requirement for becoming successful.
The development of new innovative knowledge
media now no longer depends of the professionals
within a publishing company, but requires new
innovation methods with an essential role for end-
users and stakeholders. The Knowledge Media
Institute (n.d.) defines knowledge media as “the
processes of generating, understanding and sharing
knowledge using several different media, as well as
understanding how the use of different media shapes
these processes”. The publisher has thereby no
longer a fixed role as publisher; this role will also be
assigned to the end-users (i.e. students and teachers)
and stakeholders (i.e. parents) of the knowledge
media. The fact that co-innovation enables students,
teachers and parents to participate in the production
process of a product that fits their individual needs
leads to the assumption that they rather choose that
product, than the standard products. Franke and
Piller (2004), Schreier (2006) and Grissemann and
Stokburger-Sauer (2012) provide empirical evidence
of a higher willingness to pay for products that are
self-designed than for standardized products. One of
the main reasons is according to Franke and Piller
(2004) the fact that the new products are created
with a higher preference fit of the stakeholders, than
the standardized products. The new product
development process has become an area of focus
for many academics and businesses (Leonard-
Barton, 1992; Olson et al, 1995). Many businesses
and branches give innovation a central place in their
mission and market positioning. In the marketing
literature the innovation is usually treated as an
essential strategic choice and basis of competitive
advantage (Kärkkäinen et al, 2010). In an
381
Vollenbroek W., Constantinides E. and De Vries S..
Co-creation in Social Media Platforms: End-users as Innovation Partners - Online Co-innovation within the Open Discovery Space.
DOI: 10.5220/0004398003810385
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2013), pages 381-385
ISBN: 978-989-8565-54-9
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
educational setting it is more a way of fulfilling the
needs of the stakeholders. Changing students’
behavior, increasing knowledge development,
increasing parents’ involvement and new teaching
methods that overtake the existing methods creates a
certain necessity to develop new knowledge media
in collaboration with all educational stakeholders. It
can be seen as the new paradigm after the closed-
and open innovation versions. The European
research project ‘Open Discovery Space’ is one of
the first examples of an educational platform that is
mainly focused on co-innovating new knowledge
media and disseminating these media within
European educational institutions. We are
responsible for the implementation of ODS in the
Netherlands. Within the Netherlands we apply co-
innovation as an ODS-implementation strategy. This
paper describes the concept ‘online co-innovation’,
his merits and his role in educational settings.
2 INNOVATION PROCESSES
Looking to the development of the innovation
concept over de last 100 years we can identify two
main innovation models: closed innovation model
and open innovation model (Chesbrough, 2003).
2.1 Closed Innovation Model
This approach is the oldest one and has been the
dominant business attitude to innovation the largest
part of the 21
st
century. The closed innovation model
within an educational setting consists of a new
product development process that is based on
subsequent development steps (idea generation, idea
screening, prototyping, business feasibility, financial
analysis, marketing planning, production, market
testing, and market introduction).
These steps are consequently followed by new
product development project teams or new product
departments, in deep secrecy for competitive
reasons. The new product development process is
therefore internal and requires the presence of clear
organizational structures (new product department,
new product managers, new product project teams
etc.).
The backbone is usually the R&D department
and the origin of many of these innovations is based
on technology developments. Businesses engaged in
this type of innovation often develop all necessary
know-how and technologies required internally or
often acquire firms having already developed or
patented such technologies. The degree of end-user
and stakeholder participation in the process depends
on the degree of end-user orientation of the firm;
typically this was limited to a few stages of the
process cycle like the idea generation, prototype
evaluation and market testing). End-users and
stakeholders were in such cases guided, strictly
regulated and limited. Secrecy is after all one of the
foundations of this type of innovation.
The main disadvantages of the closed innovation
are the high innovation costs and the long time-to-
market, high development costs and high failure
rates of new products.
2.2 Open Innovation Model
In the beginning of the 90s some new ideas on
innovation processes domain begun surfacing. The
end-users’ and stakeholders’ pressure for faster
innovation, high failure rates of new products, long
time-to-market trajectories, increasing innovation
costs and the fast technological change put
producers of products and services under pressure to
change their innovation tactics; efficient, faster and
cheaper innovation methods became the focus of
businesses and academia. Kambil, Frissen and
Sundaram (1999), Chesbrough (2003), von Hippel
(2005) and others put forward the idea of innovating
in networks: create networks of supply chain
partners, sometimes including even competitors, and
develop innovations created through collaboration.
The most obvious place to look for such partners
was of course the supply chain (suppliers,
middlemen, retailers) but also areas where necessary
technological or commercial expertise was present.
Many such partners, being much closer to the end-
user and stakeholder and the market could contribute
better ideas and help avoiding costly mistakes.
Next to such vertical collaborations that were
focused on efficiency, also horizontal collaborations
became popular in the 90s. Collaboratively
developed products like the Senseo coffee machine
(developed by Philips and the coffee maker
DouweEgberts) or the home draft beer device
Beertender (Developed by Heineken and Krups)
were some successful early examples of such
collaborative efforts.
In both vertical and horizontal innovation
ventures a basic issue was always the need for
openness and sharing of knowledge. This issue has
been a difficult one and it is still an issue today.
Open innovation helped businesses to become more
efficient, more innovative and reduced costs and
product development time. It also forced firms to
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become more transparent and open to the idea of
sharing financial risks.
2.2.1 Online Co-innovation
Recent developments in the area of web
technologies have placed the end-user and
stakeholders of a product or service on an extra
powerful position. The Internet technology induced
the first wave of market power migration providing
consumers with unlimited information, many
alternatives and easy transactions (Urban and Com,
2005). The increasing influence of these individuals
created a new form of open innovation: the online
co-innovation. Online co-innovation is a form of
open innovation whereby end-users and other
stakeholders of products or services, within the
social media, explicitly involve and with a shared
leadership participate in the development of
innovative products or services.
This form of cooperative innovation has three
important characteristics that make them different to
closed and open innovation: (1) explicit commitment
of end-users and stakeholders of products and
services, (2) equivalent positions of these
individuals, and (3) shared leadership of these
individuals.
Around the mid of the first decade of the 21
st
century new Internet applications often referred to as
Web 2.0 or Social Media provided people with even
more power: the end-users and stakeholders of
products or services were not anymore the passive
receiver of business generated marketing content but
had for the first time in history the option to create
and consume peer-generated marketing content.
Such new content in the form of product reviews,
product advices, recommendations or product
advocacy reduced dramatically the customer’s
dependence on location shopping and marketing
information provided by the producer. The social
media phenomenon, next to important psychological
and social effects, has brought about a new
generation of empowerment and smart consumers
(Constantinides and Fountain, 2007).
Such consumers demand a greater and more
substantial contribution to the innovation process;
they favor products and services customized to their
specific needs and taste and they are also willing to
have a voice or even actively participate in the
innovation process, usually without any direct
financial incentives. A number of businesses have
already realized that harnessing the crowd creativity
and wisdom is a new way of innovating.
Forums, bulletin boards, blogs, online social
networks, living labs and online communities are
some of the social media tools used to harness the
creativity of end-users and stakeholders of certain
products or services. Within these platforms the
individuals have the opportunity to participate and
interfere in one or all the development phases (idea
generation, idea screening, concept testing,
development, and launch) of Crawford and Di
Benedetto (2003). This creates an important position
for the individuals, because they have a large share
in the final decision processes in these development
phases. In case of ODS students, teachers and
parents collaboratively create and improve
knowledge media that will be tested in the crowd
within European educational institutions in all
educational levels.
The way of working – done by ODS – is also
increasingly taking part in other situations, because
that allows organizations to improve the personal
experiences around their products and services. A
way to fulfill this goal is by offering a specific
customer at a specific time, on a specific place and
in a certain context a wished product or service
(Romero & Molina, 2011). A successful innovation
is for that reason not only the development of new
products, but also enhance the satisfaction and
respond to the new demands on quality, quantity,
and transparency with regard to the origin of raw
materials (suppliers), timeliness (logistics and
distribution) and the availability of the product
(Omta, 2002).
In some cases the input of the crowd is so rich
and abundant that businesses do not see any more
need to innovate in house. Lego, Dell computers,
Starbucks and Toyota are some of the many
examples of firms having fully integrated the final
consumer into their innovation process. The idea is
that traditional publishing companies of educational
knowledge media also change the closed innovation
process they currently use, in a collaborative
innovation process where stakeholders can
participate in the role of publisher. The knowledge
of the crowd is bigger than the knowledge of one
individual within a publishing company of
knowledge media. In the new situation, publishers
have not ‘a monopoly position’ in the development
of knowledge media, students, teachers, parents and
other stakeholders has a large influence in the
development process. Within the online co-
innovation paradigm we introduce two basic forms
of ‘innovators’:
The Amateur Innovator: these are end users
or stakeholders of products and services
Co-creationinSocialMediaPlatforms:End-usersasInnovationPartners-OnlineCo-innovationwithintheOpen
DiscoverySpace
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willing to give away time and energy helping
businesses with ideas, recommendations or
even product testing in exchange of almost
nothing. Often such amateur product
developers become brand or product
advocates by sharing their (i.e. educational)
experiences in their social networks. While the
motives of these people are at the moment an
issue of research the fact of the matter is that a
large pool of global talent is available to
businesses for free.
The Professional Innovator: these are
usually specialists (can be end-users or
stakeholders) who in their free time are
working in solving technical or management
problems at a fee. These are for example the
e-mature teachers within an educational
institution. ODS bring together this global
talent within professional development
schools network by creating an educational e-
learning platform where students, teachers and
parents can collaboratively create and improve
knowledge media. Many businesses in other
markets make already use of this global talent
pool in solving problems by addressing the
crowd wisdom; in this case a fee is paid but
usually this fee is much lower than the cost of
the product.
We propose that online co-innovation is
becoming the new mantra of the new product and
service development in educational settings. While
extensive research must be still done many
companies are positive or even enthusiastic about it.
In the Netherlands, businesses are still skeptical
about this phenomenon; fear of the unknown and
fear of becoming too transparent seem to stay on the
way (Social Media Monitor, 2012). However
businesses do not need to worry much about
revealing secrets; we live already in the era of
openness and full transparency. The advent of social
media has raised the secrecies surrounding new
ideas. Since these ideas are quickly spread within the
social media.
3 CONCLUSIONS
Online co-innovation implies opening the doors to
end-users and stakeholders of products and services,
and evolves them into online co-innovation partners.
Due to the growth of social media, this is a
logical step for educational publishing companies to
become successful in the 21th century. They have to
listen to the voice of the end-users and stakeholders
all the way. We assume that using a co-innovation
approach to prepare students, teachers and parents of
the capabilities and value of ODS, will improve the
final implementation process of the Open Discovery
Space Platform. We expect that this is because the
students, teachers and parents feel that they will get
involved in the design process of knowledge media.
Educational learning networks with students,
teachers, parents and other educational stakeholders
in the ODS-project are some of the valuable
examples for these publishing companies to improve
the development of knowledge media. The fear of
becoming too visible is realistic but beyond the
point. The openness of the Internet, the social media
revolution and the subsequent end-users and
stakeholders empowerment has led, to a new form of
transparency and end-users and stakeholders’
engagement. The task of the publisher is to find
ways to turn this potential threat to opportunity. The
students, teachers and parents want to have their
voice heard and the publisher should do their best to
reach them and harness their creativity, knowledge,
experiences and willingness to help. An optimal fit
between the needs of the individuals and the
publishing company creates broadly accepted and
adopted knowledge media.
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