Management of Customer Co-development in Business-to-Business Markets

Management of customer co-development means involving customers in the development of new products and services, and coordinating the process. In business-tobusiness markets, customer co-development enables the development of innovations that better match customer needs and strengthens customer relationships. However, close collaboration with customers can hamper the innovativeness of new products and lead to overly customized solutions. Therefore, the management of co-development is crucial to its success. Yet the existing research on management of co-development has mainly focused on selecting the right collaboration partners, and the field lacks understanding on how to manage the tensions inherent in customer co-development. The purpose of this thesis is to increase understanding on the management of the codevelopment. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first comprises the literature review and conclusions for the whole study, and the second presents four publications. From the methodological perspective, the research papers follow exploratory qualitative research design. The empirical data comprise interviews with 60 persons, representing 25 different organizations, and a group of 11 end users. The study conceptualizes management of customer co-development in three dimensions 1) relational co-development processes, 2) co-development challenges and paradoxes, and 3) internal customer involvement processes. The findings contribute to the customersupplier relationship, innovation, and marketing management literatures by providing a framework on supplier-customer co-development, addressing co-development paradoxes and their management processes, and suggesting practices for customer involvement. For practitioners, the findings provide tools to manage the challenges related to codevelopment with customers.

DEVELOPMENT OF A FAIR CHARGING MODEL FOR A PUBLIC DATA CENTER

The purpose of the study was to explore how a public, IT services transferor, organization, comprised of autonomous entities, can effectively develop and organize its data center cost recovery mechanisms in a fair manner. The lack of a well-defined model for charges and a cost recovery scheme could cause various problems. For example one entity may be subsidizing the costs of another entity(s). Transfer pricing is in the best interest of each autonomous entity in a CCA. While transfer pricing plays a pivotal role in the price settings of services and intangible assets, TCE focuses on the arrangement at the boundary between entities. TCE is concerned with the costs, autonomy, and cooperation issues of an organization. The theory is concern with the factors that influence intra-firm transaction costs and attempting to manifest the problems involved in the determination of the charges or prices of the transactions. This study was carried out, as a single case study, in a public organization. The organization intended to transfer the IT services of its own affiliated public entities and was in the process of establishing a municipal-joint data center. Nine semi-structured interviews, including two pilot interviews, were conducted with the experts and managers of the case company and its affiliating entities. The purpose of these interviews was to explore the charging and pricing issues of the intra-firm transactions. In order to process and summarize the findings, this study employed qualitative techniques with the multiple methods of data collection. The study, by reviewing the TCE theory and a sample of transfer pricing literature, created an IT services pricing framework as a conceptual tool for illustrating the structure of transferring costs. Antecedents and consequences of the transfer price based on TCE were developed. An explanatory fair charging model was eventually developed and suggested. The findings of the study suggested that the Chargeback system was inappropriate scheme for an organization with affiliated autonomous entities. The main contribution of the study was the application of TP methodologies in the public sphere with no tax issues consideration.