Abstract
New developments in the economic arena and rapid technological changes have shifted the economic power from company to customer. As a result, companies changed their approach toward customers’ involvement in new product and/or service development.Usually, innovations are driven by inventions. But not all inventions are successful innovations. Hence, to be successful, inventions should be explored to meet customer needs and demands, and commercialized to make the company profitable (DTI - Occasional Paper No 9, 2007). According to Lowe and Marriott (2006) the innovation is a process of creating and transforming products, services, and organizational processes that are crucial for companies who want to compete in a highly dynamic and competitive market.In this regard, the paper aims to explore the interrelation between market and innovation in services industry, whilst analyzing both customers’ impact in new service development (NSD) and Kosovo’s service providers approach in including customers in service development processes.The findings highlight an increased customer power over the NSD processes as a result of their demand and unwillingness to bear the cost of or experiment with new, untested services. Given these developments service providers have started to change their approach of creating and transforming services, namely by involving customers in the service design and development processes, in order to stimulate interest for using and willingness to pay for new service.
Highlights
Globalization, digitalization, and rapidly changing business environment changed the business concepts, with it changed the marketing concepts
More than half respondents are registered as individual businesses (IB) and have less than 10 employees, meaning that the organizational hierarchy does not present a barrier for service innovation
The results indicate that service providers understand the importance of being innovative by offering new service but not that aware of customers’ role in this regard, since only 15 percent of them reported changes in the ways to interacting with customers
Summary
Globalization, digitalization, and rapidly changing business environment changed the business concepts, with it changed the marketing concepts. According to Kotler, et al(2010) there are three major forces that shaped business landscape that are the building blocks toward Marketing 3.0: the age of participation and collaborative marketing; the age of globalization and cultural marketing; and the age of creative society and human spirit marketing. In this regard, innovation is crucial for all companies who would like to coexist and compete in a highly competitive business environment. Companies should think of strategies to develop new services to build competitive advantage, to create new markets (Ostrom et al, 2012 cited by Gremyr, et al, 2014; DTI Occasional Paper No 9, 2007) and establish customer relations
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