Investigating Factors Influential on the Success of Social Product Development initiatives

Abstract

Abstract Social Product Development (SPD) is represented by tenants including crowdsourcing, open innovation, cloud-based design and manufacture (CBDM) and mass collaboration that either individually or in concert contribute to the democratization of design, manufacture and innovation. Although widely and very successfully used in thousands of documented case studies [1], these tenants have not yet fully arrived within the domain of professional and commercial industrial product development. Amongst the reasons for this are a lack of clear definitions as to what these tenants are and clear guidelines or procedures that outline how they can be used to aid the various phases of the product development process. In this paper, the authors investigate how success for each of the tenants or any combination thereof can be influenced. The tenants of Social Product Development can be mapped according to three factors; proximity to other participants (Pa), proximity to leading organization (Po) and the number of participants (N). In this paper, the authors hypothesize that these three variables are related to the success of SPD tenants. An analysis study is then conducted with expert researchers to test this hypothesis and determine whether these variables are influential on SPD success. The expert researchers determined that only one relationship, between open innovation success and organizational proximity existed, therefore rendering all other relationships non-existent and disproving the hypothesis. Results and limitations of the study are discussed before aims for further research are highlighted. These include clarifying definitions of success for Social Product Development, providing success factors for the tenants and supporting practitioners in applying SPD tenants.