مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تعامل تأمین کننده و مشتری برای نوآوری مشارکتی – الزویر 2019

Co-creation of innovation, as transcending perspective of marketing, is of growing interest in recent years. Developing new products through collaboration is recognised as beneficial to suppliers as well as customers. Businesses face challenges as to how to build and develop close and long-lasting collaborative relationships for innovation success. Owners/managers need to know about which platform to use appropriate for different engagement aspects in the relationship development. The advancement in virtual technology may offer new platforms in enabling customer engagement apart from traditional platforms. This study explores how suppliers and customers are engaged in videoconferencing in their engagement processes in collaborative innovation. Based on an empirical study of in-depth interviews with seventeen owners/managers in biotech SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprise), from a supplier’s perspective it reveals that the engagement is processual and has two dimensions for the successful collaborative relationships. Videoconferencing is a platform for engagement when distance is a barrier, it’s used in both dimensions of the engagement, and to facilitate cognition and support affect which help form and cement trusting relationships. The authors explain the process of videoconferencing engagement by a ladder of engagement model through social networking theory in building and applying social capital.

Introduction

We are interested in establishing how customer engagement is furthered by videoconferencing (VC). Understanding engagement as representing a particular close relationship between suppliers and customers, we focus on collaboration for co-creating innovative products where the customer’s engagement creates the conditions for successful co-creation. This focus offers a theoretically valuable example of engagement process for analysis. Co-creation and engagement share common characteristics such as building on interactive experiences (Conduit & Chen, 2017) with co-creation a transcending perspective of marketing. Whilst engagement is increasingly recognised as important for brand management in B2C markets, less is known about engagement in B2B markets (Conduit & Chen, 2017; Gambetti & Graffigna, 2010) at a micro level. We believe that exploring engagement in the B2B relationship of supplier-customer collaboration in SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) may be useful for a better understanding of practices. We are specifically interested in how one mode of engagement (Phillips & McQuarrie, 2010), videoconferencing enables engagement (Hollebeek, Conduit, & Brodie, 2016), allowing us to better understand the nature, processes and dynamics surrounding engagement-based relationships. Accordingly, we want to relate what has been described as the transformative power of virtual technology (Wendt & Harris, 1996) that has changed the interactive experiences in supplier-customer relationships (Brodie, Ilic, Juric, & Hollebeek, 2013) with the new dominant logic of marketing, engagement.