부산대학교 도서관

Imagine two companies with two similar products are fiercely competing for customers. They have both been aggressively protecting their intellectual property and stifling public user criticism, until one decides to share its design with its user community and encourage user customization. The first spends significant resources on enticing and retaining users, while the other improves their product with their users and actively involves them in their product development process. The second increases their reputation among their users, is able to innovate and address user concerns quickly and cheaply and, as a consequence, sees its sales begin to rocket. This scenario is representative of what is known as "Social Product Development". Despite many successful examples of SPD in industry, with tangible proof of reduced development time and cost, there is a lack of implementation of SPD. The aim of this thesis is to determine why this is and to provide applicable research to support the implementation of SPD in industry. Specifically, this thesis addresses two Primary Research Questions: 1. What are the barriers for the implementation of SPD in industry? 2. How can the implementation of SPD be supported? For the first Primary Research Question a literature study accompanied by semi-structured interviews with experts are conducted. The results of these research methods were a list of barriers to the implementation of SPD as defined by the interview participants. From these barriers, Secondary Research Questions to address the second Primary Research Question were derived. Specifically, these included research questions on problem preparation for an SPD initiative, selecting an SPD invitiative, structuring SPD initiatives, choosing incentives and making design decisions for an SPD initiative. To address these Secondary Research Questions, an expert analysis experiment and a crowdsourcing success factor experiment were conducted. The results of these methods included a expert conclusion that analysis frameworks for SPD tenants must be isolated to individual tenants as well as a series of factors that dictate the success of SPD initiatives. In addressing these Primary Research Questions, this thesis provides original contributions to the body of work on SPD as follows: 1. The first interview study with industry practitioners revealing some of the key challenges for the implementation of SPD 2. An SPD implementation framework that allows industry practitioners to identify the most appropriate SPD initiative to solve a particular design problem 3. An SPD performance assessment tool that allows industry practitioners to, with quantitative feedback, determine how their SPD initiative design decisions and their businesses circumstances, such as the way they have framed their problem and their number of Twitter followers, impacts the participation in their SPD initiative.