Identifying typologies of user-innovators in value co-creation.

Since 1990s, customer competence has been recognised as a key source of co-creation in new product development (NPD). In high-technology product innovation, this concept is more pivotal since firms cannot achieve fast and successful innovation without collaboration and network. However, how to identify the right customers for collaborative product innovation in high-technology industry context is an unresolved question in both marketing theory and practice. This remaining question may stem from a lack of consensus in how extant research defined the two key considerations in co-creation activities, named as ‘innovation typologies’ and ‘degree of co-creation’. To address the gap and further develop the traditional concepts in NPD, this research is aimed to gain an insight of customers’ behaviour in high-technology industry context. Within the scope of research, this paper will employ ‘user-innovator’ as the main body of knowledge to develop study on their behaviours and competence in various stages of NPD process. Participant observation and in-depth interview techniques will be conducted amongst participants in Robotics project run by researchers in the University of Birmingham and a co-creatin process run by IBM. The study is expected to identify clusters of user-innovators from a holistic view, understand their competence in co-creation and gain a broader perspective in approaching innovation attempts. In addition to its originality in literature of cocreation and consumer behaviour, this study will bring valuable contributions in assisting firms to achieve a higher degree of co-creation with customers, including a generation of tacit knowledge which is widely known to be difficult to transform in high-technology context.