Customer-based innovation of e-knowledge services

The importance of after-innovation 1. Introduction This paper will analyse the innovation process within knowledge services on the basis of case studies. The objective to develop new e-knowledge services, which means knowledge service products that are provided via the Internet or similar IT-networks (e.g. mobile phone networks). The customer can download and use the service as a self-service. The focus is on how customers are involved in the process of developing the new service and how the service provider can benefit from the innovation, for example by making the service a general product that can be sold to other clients. The provision of e-knowledge services has been a possibility for some time, however, it has in practice rarely been a reality. The Internet has been used as a marketing-channel, but rarely as a production means, thus we can talk of real self-service products. Studies of the creation of self-service products therefore give a possibility for providing new knowledge about the particular innovation process of developing an e-knowledge service. That the customers are deeply involved in the innovation process, at least in one of the cases, gives a further possibility of studying one of the core issues in innovation research, which has not been studied very much, namely user or customer based innovation.