Always a Happy Ending? Who, When and How should Users be engaged in Service Innovation

User engagement is one way to develop user-oriented service innovations. This TEKES funded project aims to create a holistic view of the multiple types of user engagement that are appropriate and functional in different contexts, while taking into account the nature of the service, the goals and offering of the firm/public organization and the users.

The project gathers and classifies available research on customer engagement, and thereby leads to increased theoretical understanding, and offers a ground for building a practical toolkit. The project strives to co-operate with empirical projects (among others TEKES Serve-projects), and on one hand obtain empirical material from them, on the other hand offer them solid theoretical knowledge and classifications that can be applied to different contexts. The project includes different customer groups comprehensively: it does not take only a lead user perspective but also takes into account ordinary users.

Also the different stages of the innovation process will be covered: in addition to the idea-generation stage, it investigates when, where and what kind of users could and should be engaged in the development and implementation of a new service concept. In addition, the later developments of the service during use will be regarded as innovation activity. The project relies heavily on the service-dominant (S-D) logic approach that emphasizes the contextual and experiential nature of value of services, as well as users as co-creators of value.