Communitybasierte Open Innovation-­Plattformen für ältere Nutzer : kommunikative Usability, Sociability und eTrust

• Community-based open innovation platforms for older users : communicative usability, sociability and eTrust

Digmayer, Claas; Jakobs, Eva-Maria (Thesis advisor); Niehr, Thomas (Thesis advisor)

Aachen (2016)
Dissertation / PhD Thesis

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2016

Abstract

The principle of open innovation aims at involving customers in value creation processes to develop target group-oriented products (Reichswald / Piller 2009). Community-based open innovation platforms are a method to realize the approach: Target group representatives are invited to submit online proposals on product innovations, rate, comment and develop jointly. The successful use of the method depends largely on how it is design such platforms in a user-centerd way. The design process requires knowledge about the user-, task- and media-appropriate design of digital information, communication and interaction formats, use patterns and related phenomena. The primarily economics-dominated literature on open innovation methods rarely discusses such aspects.This work fills some of the research gaps through an empirical study of linguistic and communicative requirements for the design of community-based open innovation platforms. The study focuses on the case of a platform on which the elderly were invited to submit innovative proposals to mobile phones. Three questions are focused: What challenges arise for seniors in the use of innovation platforms? What assistance do older users need? By what means can collaborative authoring actions be conveyed between users to develop submitted idea proposals?Community-based open innovation platforms are explored form the perspective of potential users in an empirical study. Each of the three issues mentioned will be examined in a separate study. The results are situated in a literatur-based study model.The first study focuses on sensitive points of the platform design: With a combination of expert and user-oriented evaluation methods it is investigated, what challenges seniors face in a first-contact situation with the hypertext pattern innovation platform are caused by which design aspects. Problem areas of linguistic-communicative platform design are identified. In second study examines which user aids older users require to solve problems in the operation of an innovation platform and its functions - especially complex functions such innovation toolkits (von Hippel 2001). Subsequently, a video tutorial for the platform is developed and evaluated with representatives of the target group in user tests. Requirements to the linguistic and communication design of support services that users expect in first-contact situations with new utility patents as innovation platforms are derived. The third study focuses on the user interaction. Users can interact on the examined innovation platform by commenting contributions of other users. Chains of comments are examined with a content analysis approach concerning aspects such as interactive value, sociability and confidence building. The analysis provides clues to interaction strategies that users apply and which promote or reduce the collaboration between users in the development of ideas. From the results policies are derived for user interaction, which intend to build sociability and trust between users.The findings of this thesis are relevant for approaches that focuses on community-based open innovation methods or analyze linguistic-communicative phenomena of Web 2.0 environments.