A consideration on success factors in product innovation from the viewpoints of value co-creation with customers

Abstract

Among most of product planners in manufacturing companies, it has been believed that there must be some common elements or factors in successful product planning processes. There seems to be, however, no established general theories or common frameworks in product planning practices yet. Those who created successful products are considered as unusual people having special talents. However, it is obvious that even those gifted product planners sometimes made mistakes and launched disappointing products into the marketplace. Though they must have learned something from those failures and must have fine-tuned or even reconsidered them from scratch in the next new product planning processes, which were usually well accepted, they have never revealed what they learned and how they redesigned them. Our hypothesis is that they intentionally or unintentionally implement the anticipated “value in use” into their products so that their target customers easily appreciate intangible service values rather than products themselves as vehicles. This paper is a first step towards better understanding for successful product planning process by analyzing actual four product planning cases in the aspects of Service Dominant Logic in which value in use is conceptually clarified.