Consumer Citizens as Leading Innovators – Enhancing Value Creation Potential through Consumer-Consumer-Interaction

Consumer Citizens as Leading Innovators – Enhancing Value Creation Potential through Consumer-Consumer-Interaction

Benjamin Diehl and Ulf Schrader

We base this conceptual paper on the assumption that sustainable consumption can be enhanced, facilitated and accelerated by service and product innovations in the sustainability context¹⁰ and that the success factors of innovation management, namely a) strong market-orientation and b) heigh creative potential are promisingly realized by integrating users in the innovation process (Lüthje/Herstatt 2004; von Hippel, 2005; Franke/von Hippel/Schreier 2006).

We understand sustainable consumption – directly referring to the World Commission of Environment and Development (1987) definition of sustainability – as the use of goods and services, that satisfies consumer needs, preserves the environment and natural resources by also being socially responsible and economically stable.

This concept is obviously closely related to the definition of a consumer citizen, understood as an individual who makes systematic choices based on the above mentioned sustainable considerations (CCN 2005).

We argue very much in line with the priorities of the Agenda 21 (UN 1992), namely the need for action a) to change patterns of consumption and production that contradict the idea of sustainability and b) to deepen our understanding of consumer behavior and to enrich our knowledge about how to foster sustainable consumption more effectively.

Defining a) as the invention, development and use of sustainable technologies and b) as an innovative way to identify special consumer needs as well as the diffusion of products and services that enable sustainable consumption patterns on the mass market, we directly come to the main objectives of this paper, i.e. clarifying the importance of innovations in the sustainability context in general and the promising concept of user integration in innovation processes in particular.

When aiming at enabling, facilitating and accelerating sustainable consumption, innovations of products and services in the field of sustainability have to meet or even exceed existing standards concerning usability, convenience, affordability and amortization.

Here the central role of companies that develop and promote these innovations becomes overt. But why should companies engage in such an “open-(for-sustainable)-innovation” behavior? We state that there is an enormous push factor for corporations to be sustainable and to be innovative accordingly, namely the economic dimension. Sustainable innovations should not be considered as optional activities any more but strategic necessities.

Innovations in general became the essential success factor on globalized and mostly saturated markets. Facing a market situation in which physical-technical quality characteristics of products are often not substantially distinguishable anymore, innovations can proactively counteract this complex problem of product-differentiation by making use of opportunities resulting from evolving consumer needs and additional product requirements (Trommsdorff/ Steinhoff 2006).

Management and its R&D-departments have to focus increasingly on innovations, meaning a) radical new product- and service-developments to fill out a market niche or b) innovation processes that concentrate on the diffusion of former niche products to the mass market. In the context of enhancing diffusion of products, we also observe a general increase of importance concerning new and competitive communication-strategies on modern markets that enable products and services to be distinguishable on the market, e. g. by experience-oriented marketing approaches or by integrating dialogical communication-platforms to meet consumer needs better and directly (Chaudhuri/Holbrook 2001; Reichwald/Piller 2006).

These observations result in following questions that are closely related with each other: Firstly, how to get a detailed insight of consumer needs and their demands on new products? Secondly, how to foster a successful diffusion on the mass market?

Coming to the first question: Are there new, evolving consumer needs? We observe societal changes in regard of values and norms related to consumption behavior, based on a sensitization for ethical and sustainable themes. Promoting sustainable innovations is therefore not restricted to special interest groups anymore but should be positioned as socially and ecological responsible alternatives on the mass market (Fricke/Schrader 2009).

Are there special product requirements? There is not only demand for sustainable products themselves, but furthermore the need to facilitate their use in everyday life (Heis-kanen/Kasanen/Timonen 2004). Facilitation includes striving for technical maturity, easy application as well as providing all necessary information about production and handling. Especially concerning sustainable consumption there is still insufficient knowledge on the consumer side; which is essential, because even the most sustainable products can only unfold their full impact if they are used correctly (Hoffmann et al. 2004).

Now coming to the second question: How to foster a successful diffusion on the mass market? The latter points already highlighted necessary basics for a successful introduction, pro-motion and finally diffusion of sustainable innovations on the mass market. But today’s marketing research and advertising agencies still cannot prevent flop rates of up to 90%. In this context again „customer or market orientation is amongst the most important success factors for new products” (Hoffmann 2007: S. 352). New attempts to enable companies to get a detailed insight in consumer needs will be necessary.

To sum up this paragraph, we can state that taking sustainability and innovation together evolving “sustainnovations” offer great potentials to foster socially and environmentally responsible behaviour by enabling companies to be successful on high competitive markets. Sustainability can be seen as one of the major drivers of the so called competitive innovation advantage (Trommsdorff/Steinhoff 2006) nowadays, namely by successfully meeting demands concerning the fulfilling of certain consumer demands, corresponding recognition as satisfying by consumers and –by its inner most meaning- especially not being seen as running risk to be invalidated by its environment.