Buyer/seller collaboration through measurement of beliefs on innovativeness of products

Today's industry is faced with strong and fierce competition. As a consequence, companies have been in search of creating values to cope with these challenges. In this context, innovation has been an essential instrument for creating values to overcome existing tackles. Therefore, companies have attempted to develop capabilities for innovating and thereby their efforts have been extensively intensified on collaboration structures. Recent attempts have been usually structured to form collaboration architectures among the sellers or governmental organizations. However, it is remarkable that, the real value of an innovation comes out when it has been perceived by the customers. Therefore, there is an actual need of collaboration among the sellers and buyers based on the customer perceptions. This paper proposes a framework for the collaboration of sellers and buyers to enhance the innovation capabilities of firms through a novel scheme for measurement of innovation perceptions which is indeed the real/actual output of the innovation process. The proposed framework provides a space and a map for the employment of the proposed measurement scheme. Along with the proposed framework, customers are expected to collaborate with sellers by answering the questions given in the specifically prepared innovation survey. The survey includes the questions prepared based on the factors barrowed from “Rogersian characteristics of innovation perception” (RCIP). Perceptions are attempted to be measured using the belief functions which fuzziness of perception is already included in. Furthermore, by the use of opinion triangles and consensus operator, perceptions of customers on each of the RCIP are fused into a single and meaningful output on the innovativeness of a certain product. The proposed framework is illustrated through an application for a reputed cellular phone example. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) developing a collaboration framework among customers and business owners to enhance innovation capabilities by constructing a communication channel based on innovativeness of the products; (2) developing an innovation measurement scheme which returns an objective measure by adding subjective opinions of individuals on innovativeness of certain product.