A New Framework of Ideation-oriented Customer Involvement

From designer's perspective, depending on which activity, idea generation or idea evaluation, a customer is primarily involved for, various customer involvements can be classified into three categories: ideation-oriented, evaluation-oriented, and result-oriented. This paper addresses two critical questions for the ideation-oriented customer involvement: how to identify the right customers to involve and how to evaluate their ideation outcome accordingly. A variety of desirable competences are proposed to assess candidate customer's qualifications, which include: social, cultural, system thinking, product, and technical competences. And a set of design metrics are prescribed to evaluate the customer's ideation outcome, which include: feasibility, testability, clarity, simplicity, and analogy.