Customer involvement-based business models
Creators: name: Horn, Meret
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2017
Subjects: 658.1: Organisation und Finanzen

description: Strategy in a digital age is a challenging undertaking. Businesses are pressured to embrace the capabilities emerging from digitalization, whilst progressively enhancing their efficiency. The interaction with the customer is limited to certain “touch points” although their powerful position can no longer be neglected. Exhausted value creation strategies must be reinvented and individuals must be acknowledged as new locus of value creation. This calls for disruptive business model strategies, beyond the dominant firm and industry logic. Businesses must start to create, deliver and capture value together with the customer, as one integrated system.

This bachelor thesis paves the way for first movers, who wish to create such disruptive business model strategies. It goes further than the already existing recommendations on how customer involvement can be enhanced. This empirical study tests the theoretical feasibly of a fully customer involvement-based business model. It outlines such a business model and defines its critical components.

The examination of academic research on the topics business models and customer involvement served as basis, upon which the qualitative social inquiry was built. The profound analysis of five case studies, which involved customers in their businesses, was followed by a generalization of equivalent findings. This allowed the theoretical conception of a customer involvement-based business model.

The findings lend support to the notion that a customer involvement-based business model is technically feasible. Several critical components were identified. Most importantly customers must be willing and motivated to play a central role in the value creation. As designer or innovator of a product or service the customer is the initiator of all successive activities in the value creation process. The co-creation happens together with the company, which is directly involved in the remaining steps of the value creation process. The value proposition, which solves a pain point in customer’s lives or brings significant additional value to them, is furthermore supported by a digital platform, provided by the company. This allows customers to share their co-creation experience with a global network or community and it fosters the emotional bond with the company. Along with this mutual interdependency, the business model must be embedded in a certain context. A strong ecosystem promotes the network effect and enables new customers to make their own co-creation experience. Through being part of an on-demand economy and through continuously following current trends like individualism, e-commerce or entrepreneurism, the company flexibly adapts to the changing customer.

This bachelor thesis emphasizes the shift from company-centric to customer-centric perceptions. It serves as groundwork for business model innovators and future studies. The developed
business model should particularly be applied to existing companies to test its practical feasibility.