Designing Open Innovation Based Product Development Process For Smes Using Mobile Technologies
Abstract
The use of technology in innovative product design process is becoming very accelerative all over the world. Following that, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must practice innovative operations due to the fact that they have financial and technical incapabilities. In spite of all the essentialities, researches showed that research and development (R&D) expenditures of SMEs are under 5% in 2015. Focusing on SMEs, it was observed that R&D infrastructure of them is extremely weak. Research conducted in 2015 in Turkey, according to R&D expenditures of firms showed that first ten enterprises in the list were multinational, so not SMEs.
Open innovation is very fundamental for SMEs to keep their competitive advantages. Nowadays, important multinational firms have left their closed structure about R&D and innovation practices. As a result of this; firms have started to behave accordingly to open innovation systems. In open innovation, all the external partners should participate in the business processes. However, there are not enough researches about it.
The purpose of this paper is to design product development processes of SMEs using mobile technologies. The system which was allowed the effects of external partners was designed for it. According to data collected through in-depth interviews with experts and literature review, the points are given by customers were taken into account and analyzed. The analysis process was applied according to selection criteria specified.
Recently, open innovation has been provided by the "contestification" method. Contestification is the method that enables users to participate in an ideation contest and all the users have right to vote for ideas. As a result of this, innovative ideas come to realize. Despite of the importance as mentioned, there are few researches about the application of contestification method via mobile technologies. For this reason, contestification method was used to accelerate the product development process in this study.
This research sheds light on the contribution of the users for the product development process. In the measurement process, it was observed that SMEs needed this kind of research for the efficient decision making with less financial resources and method developed made the analysis process easier.
Keywords: Mobile technologies, SMEs, Open innovation, Contestification, Product development
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