Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.@en

Access-based product-service systems (AB-PSS) are business models that can potentially decouple the satisfaction of consumer needs from environmental impacts. Hence, they have been promoted for the circular economy. Their sustainability potential has not yet been realised because consumer adoption is lagging. Although this challenge has been studied for two decades, knowledge to identify and address AB-PSS adoption barriers that matter to consumers is lacking. We hypothesise that the duration of use, the time a consumer obtains exclusive access to a specific product (short-term vs. long-term) and the type of product (bicycles vs. clothing) moderate the importance of AB-PSS adoption barriers to consumers. We compared several adoption barriers across four AB-PSS and found that the duration of use and the type of product significantly moderated the importance of some AB-PSS adoption barriers. More specifically, the Effort to access has a higher influence on consumer preference for short-term AB-PSS, whereas Product quality has a higher influence on consumer preference for long-term AB-PSS. We also found that Effort to access and Product characteristics were more important for bicycle AB-PSS, whereas Contamination and Product quality were more important for clothing AB-PSS. These insights help companies to identify and design out key AB-PSS consumer adoption barriers.

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Over the past few decades, the impact of customer integration on radical new product (RNP) innovation has been extensively investigated. To date, this important topic presents inconsistent empirical findings that must be converged. In this paper, our systematic literature review addresses these inconsistencies by taking a consolidated view of customer integration's effects on the development of RNPs. This extensive review of 153 empirical papers has two main objectives. First, we provide the primary reasons for inconsistent findings by scrutinizing the operationalizations of customer types (i.e., current customers, potential customers, ordinary users, or users with domain-specific skills) and RNPs (i.e., technological innovativeness, or both technological and market innovativeness) used in the studies, as well as the different perspectives on customer integration [i.e., customer-based idea evaluation, participation in direct and indirect idea generation, research and development (R&D) partnerships with customers, having a customer orientation, and disseminating customer knowledge via R&D-marketing collaborations]. Second, we present a synthesized view on factors in the sphere of the innovating company and the customer that influence customer integration's success along three phases of the radical innovation development process (i.e., discovery, incubation, and acceleration). Finally, we present avenues for future research and discuss managerial implications of our synthesized view.@en

Access-based product-service systems (AB-PSS) allow consumers to use products for a fee and might support the transition towards a circular economy. This type of business model could decrease negative impacts of consumption by reducing the number of products needed; either by extending products’ lifetimes or by intensifying the use of products. Many AB-PSS in consumer markets are highly digitalised; they utilise digital platforms, have sensors embedded in the products, and rely on users’ smartphones. To better understand how digitalisation impacts consumers’ attitudes and use experiences in mobility AB-PSS, we applied a mixed-methods approach consisting of a survey (n=47) and interviews (n=10). Our findings suggest that many short-term AB-PSS, such as bicycle sharing, owe their recent success to digitalisation. Further, consumers’ digital confidence influences their attitude towards short-term AB-PSS. During the use of AB-PSS, users value the convenience and flexibility enabled by the digital aspects. Digitalisation also made short-term mobility AB-PSS susceptible to disruptions because the AB-PSS rely on the functioning of many digital aspects. Users seem to dislike phoning customer service and increasingly depend on their smartphones. We also provide a brief outlook of what 5G mobile networks might imply for mobility AB-PSS. With this paper, we contribute a consumer perspective on the digitalisation of services. Our findings help service designers, user experience designers, and app developers to design digitalised AB-PSS for consumer markets.

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The food processing sector has a considerable environmental impact, due to large volumes of food and packaging waste. Eco-innovations present an important opportunity to reduce this impact. Yet, initial insights suggest that new technologies face considerable challenges to their adoption. The eco-innovation adoption literature has overlooked the food processing sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers inhibiting the adoption of waste reducing eco-innovations in the food processing sector. We present four detailed case studies of new technologies at different stages of adoption in the UK and Netherlands. The findings reveal ten barriers to the adoption of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector. The barriers identified include concerns over the influence of technologies on the product's characteristics, its retailing, and a perceived lack of consumer demand. These barriers arise from the powerful influence of retailers within the food supply chain, the influence of technologies on in-store point of sale displays, and the need for distribution trials. We conclude that the adoption of new technologies requires simultaneous acceptance by both food processor and retailers. The paper provides recommendations for policy makers and innovation managers to increase the adoption and diffusion of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector, as well as implications for future research.

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Combining sustainable consumption with the circular economy concept could help tackle challenges, such as resource scarcity and climate change by reducing resource throughput and increasing cycling of products and materials within the economic system, thereby reducing emissions and virgin material use. To achieve sustainable consumption in a circular economy production and consumption practices need to change. Business models can potentially influence both practices as it defines how a company conducts business and shapes the company-consumer relationship. This paper developed future business models for sustainable consumption through two rounds of semi-structured interviews with experts from academia, industry, and policy. During the first interview round, four business model elements that are important for sustainable consumption were identified: Resource strategy, Revenue model, Consumer effort, and Objective to (decrease/increase) consumption level. Based on these elements, we developed a comprehensive business model framework. Using this framework, experts envisioned future business models for sustainable consumption of clothing during the second interview round. The findings of this study suggest that the most promising business models for sustainable consumption are those that reduce overall consumption levels and consumer effort. Further, we found that a diverse range of business models in the market can potentially enable different customer segments to consume sustainably.@en

Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better-developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers’ narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum.@en

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

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This article investigates the role of transportation in concept tests (i.e., a vivid mental image of a new product concept and the way of using it) for radically new products. Based on transportation literature, the article proposes that concept descriptions in a story format can stimulate transportation. Further, the article builds on the literature on domain-specific skills to propose that technological reflectiveness (i.e., the ability to think about the impact of a technological product on its users and society in general) and product expertise increase transportation. The article explores the effect that transportation has on the ability of consumers to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of a radically new product and on their ability to provide valuable concept improvement ideas (i.e., ideas that are highly novel, feasible, and beneficial for consumers). A quasi-experiment with 253 participants demonstrates that a story format, product experience with related product categories, and technological reflectiveness increased transportation with regard to radically new products. The empirical research also showed that transportation facilitates the enumeration of the advantages and the disadvantages of a concept, resulting in more valuable concept improvement ideas. These findings suggest that innovation managers should strive to evoke transportation in concept tests for radically new products, as transportation allows consumers to provide more valuable input.@en

Since the introduction of open innovation (OI), both firms and academics have widely acknowledged the potential of unlocking large firms’ innovation potential through interactions with external parties, such as young ventures. These asymmetric partnerships are prone to several problems related to communication, roles and responsibilities, cultural differences, and operational issues, for which solutions and best practices have been proposed. However, all these solutions focus on the partnership itself; hence, on the “Get & Manage (GM)” stages. Unfortunately, the processes leading to a partnership; i.e., the “Want & Find (WF)” stages before the partnership, have largely been overlooked. The central thesis of this manuscript is that solutions that are implemented in the early “WF” stages have a positive impact on the outcomes of an asymmetric large firm — young venture partnership. We will show that attention to set-up and communication efforts in these early stages is needed, and discuss how our detailed explanations of such fruitful solutions contribute to the extant literature on asymmetric OI collaborations.@en

Young ventures can be highly interesting innovation partners for large firms. However, large firms frequently pursue collaborations with young ventures without a clear action plan, neglecting the challenges that such asymmetric partnerships may bring. Our study identifies multiple opportunities and challenges for large firms that want to collaborate with young ventures. By understanding the opportunities offered by collaborations with young ventures while simultaneously recognizing the challenges in different stages of the innovation process, large firms can achieve better results from these collaborations. We offer a young venture collaboration decision-making model to support managers in large firms in making the right decisions around asymmetric collaborations with young ventures.@en

This article explores how perceived disempowerment impacts the intention to adopt smart autonomous products. Empirically, the paper builds on three studies to show this impact. Study 1 explores the relevance of the perceived disempowerment in respect of smart autonomous products. Study 2 manipulates autonomy of smart products and finds that perceived disempowerment mediates the link between smart products’ autonomy and adoption intention. Study 3 indicates that an intervention design―that is, a product design that allows consumers to intervene in the actions of an autonomous smart product―can reduce their perceived disempowerment in respect of autonomous smart products. Further, Study 3 reveals that personal innovativeness moderates the role that an intervention design plays in product adoption: an intervention design shows a positive effect on adoption intention for individuals with low personal innovativeness, but for those with high personal innovativeness no effect of an intervention design is present on adoption intention. The authors suggest that managers consider consumers’ perceived disempowerment when designing autonomous smart products, because (1) perceived disempowerment reduces adoption and (2) when targeted at consumers with low personal innovativeness, an intervention design reduces their perceived disempowerment.@en

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners’ judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships.@en

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners’ judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships.@en