Decision Support for the Selection of Appropriate Customer Integration Methods

Co-creating innovations with external stakeholders, such as customers, is gaining popularity among companies as a way to address the competitive and market pressures they face. To this end, research has brought forward a notable number of customer integration methods. The selection of a particular method is governed by various organizational constraints; there is, however, a paucity of research providing decision support for practitioners in terms of when to use which customer integration method. Using the design science approach, our research addresses this research gap by implementing a decision support system to assist practitioners in the selection of appropriate customer integration methods. We elicit requirements from literature and expert interviews, and subsequently design, implement, and evaluate a prototype of the system. Based on identified requirements, the prototype is implemented as a webbased tool (HTML5). The DSS tool aims to acquaint practitioners with use cases and experiences with different customer integration methods.