مدیریت دانش مشتری و مدل کسب و کار نوآوری IT فعال : یک چارچوب مفهومی و مطالعه موردی از چین

This paper provides a conceptual framework to explore the linking mechanisms between customer knowledge management and IT-based business model innovation. With a case study from a Chinese leading telecommunications company, this paper attempts to empirically justify the model. In this conceptual model, three types of customer-related knowledge (i.e., knowledge about customer, knowledge from customer and knowledge for customer) contribute to value creation in business model innovation within different mechanisms. Meanwhile, IT increases knowledge accessibility for both firms and customers in value delivery, and enables firms to increase revenue streams with lower costs in value capture for business model innovation. The study links customer knowledge management research to business model innovation literature, and extends the customer knowledge management research through integrating both customer perspective and firm perspective. For practitioners, this study may help companies to understand the linking mechanisms and identify the opportunities of gaining benefit from bridging customer knowledge management and business model innovation.

The literature has highlighted the importance of business model design to firm performance (e.g., Afuah, 2004 and Zott & Amit, 2008), especially with the emergence of the Internet technology and its massive adoption for e-business (Ghaziani & Ventresca, 2005). Despite scholars may use different definitions of business model in different ways, there is some consensus that it describes the design of the value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms to be employed by firms (Chesbrough, 2010, Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002, Teece, 2010 and Zott et al., 2011). Due to the post-industrial rise of the knowledge economy and digital technology, IT-enabled business model becomes an important locus of innovation and the design of an appropriate IT-enabled business model is increasingly seen as a crucial business decision for firms (Amit and Zott, 2001, Chesbrough, 2010 and Teece, 2010). Meanwhile, as Teece (2010) noted, in order to successfully realize the potential of business model, firms need to be more customer-centric––“deliver value to customers, entice customers to pay for value, and convert those payments to profit” (Teece, 2010, p. 172), and manage customer-related knowledge more effectively (Rollins & Halinen, 2005). In doing so, firms need to not only actively acquired from customers, but also activate the knowledge interaction between firms and customers and the knowledge sharing among users (Baldwin et al., 2006 and Franke & Shah, 2003; von Hippel, 1986 and von Hippel, 1994). Therefore, understanding customers’ demand and behavior through managing the knowledge flow between a firm and its customers becomes a critical activity for business model innovation (Novo, 2004 and Smith and McKeen, 2005). However, it is worth noting that the linkage between customer knowledge management and business model innovation remains a less discussed issue in the literature. In addition, although the importance of IT to customer knowledge management and business model innovation has been emphasized in the literature (Amit and Zott, 2001 and Rowley, 2002), the process and mechanisms behind the influence of customer knowledge on IT-enabled business model innovation remain mostly as a black box (Zott et al., 2011). This paper attempts to bridge these theory gaps. More specifically, in this paper we focus on two related questions. First, what types of customer-related knowledge are included in IT-enabled business model innovation and how do these different types of knowledge influence the process of business model innovation? Second, as an enabler for business model innovation, how does IT influences the linkage between customer-related knowledge and business model innovation? In doing so, we introduce a conceptual framework to capture the linking mechanisms between customer knowledge management and IT-enabled business model innovation through integrating both customer perspective and service provider/producer perspective. Then case study method will be employed to validate this conceptual framework. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: A conceptual framework gives the research framework; research method describes the case subject and data collection; the empirical results from a longitudinal case study are presented in case study; and finally, in the discussion and conclusion section of the paper, we provide a summary of the research findings, theoretical contributions, managerial implications, limitations and future research directions for the study.

Summary of research findings In this study, we present a conceptual framework to describe the linkage between customer knowledge management and IT-enabled business model innovation through investigating the influence of different types of customer knowledge on value creation and the role of IT in value delivery and value capture. Specifically, we find that different types of customer-related knowledge (i.e., knowledge about customer, knowledge from customer and knowledge for customer) contribute to value creation in business model innovation with different yet complementary mechanisms. Knowledge about customer can lead to improved customers’ consumption experience through better fulfilling customer’s needs with customized products/services by service providers/producers with a deep understanding of customers. Knowledge from customers mainly contributes to customers’ consumption experience through offering customized products for customers and improved use experience for customers. Knowledge for customer mainly contributes to customers’ consumption experience through helping customers to make better purchase decision and obtain improved use experience. Moreover, in the process of value delivery and value capture for IT-enabled business model innovation, IT plays as an essential instrument in enabling customer knowledge management, as well as in bridging customer knowledge management and business model innovation. The customer knowledge management with IT application greatly facilitates knowledge interactions at a lower cost. Meanwhile, IT can effectively help companies to capture value from widening revenue streams and lowering operation costs, which form the basis of a profitable and sustainable business model. Theoretical contributions First, this study contributes to the literature by bridging the customer knowledge management studies and the business model innovation literature. Our research reveals the influence of different types of customer knowledge on value creation and the role of IT in value delivery and value capture. In doing so, the mechanisms through which customer knowledge management works on IT-enabled business model innovation are analyzed. As such, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the process of customer knowledge management. Moreover, the study extends the prior studies from the customer knowledge management perspective. Most of the previous studies emphasize the role of customer knowledge on company side and value created for customers (Gibbert et al., 2002 and Smith and McKeen, 2005). Customers are often implicitly assumed to play a limited and largely passive role in these studies. This study stresses the benefits related with customer knowledge management both for customers and companies, and emphasizes an active role of customers in creating, sharing and using knowledge in business model innovation. Second, the model proposed in this study has a potential to be extended into broader contexts, despite this model is developed in the context of IT-enabled business model innovation. Owing to the nature of IT-enabled business model innovation context (such as the case in telecommunication service industry for the present study), customer knowledge and the associated IT applications are in fact themselves the products/services that can generate revenues (e.g. customers need to pay for the SMS, and the access to portals to obtain their desired information and knowledge). This is somewhat different from other industries in which customer knowledge may be provided as value-added services and the related IT-enabled applications are mainly for back-office usage. In spite of such a difference, the mechanisms through which customer-related knowledge contributes to consumption experience for consumers and value creation will remain the same as in our model. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that context difference may result in several differences in value delivery and value capture for business model innovation, which should be taken into consideration when we attempt to generalize the current model into other contexts. Unlike the value delivery in most of manufacturing firms, value delivery for IT-enabled business model innovation is often featured with the separation of accessing IT-enable service and implementing service-targeting activity. For instance, in the TAIN case of this study, how to access the agricultural information service (in terms of short message service, call center and internet) provided by China Unicom is different from how to utilize this service to improve agricultural productivity for rural customers. Thus, China Unicom need to not only provide the knowledge needed for rural customers to better use IT tools, but also offer the knowledge and information needed in agricultural production and product selling for them. In addition, because IT-enable service has a low level of marginal cost in service providing (Amit & Zott, 2001), knowledge accessibility will have a more significant influence on value delivery and value capture than cost factors do. Then, the improved consumption experience through better meeting market demand with customized products will make customers less sensitive to cost/price and more sensitive to value. As a consequence, the potential conflict in the interest trade-off between firms and customers3 will be greatly reduced in IT-enabled business model innovation. Finally, with regard to customer knowledge management, our study offers a complementary perspective to user innovation research. User innovation refers to the phenomenon that users play a proactive role by creating new technology applications rather than simply adopting existing ones (Baldwin et al., 2006 and von Hippel, 1986). In this study, the customer knowledge management in IT-enabled business model innovation is similar to knowledge-related aspect of user innovation in that user innovation is also closely associated with the knowledge interaction between firms and customers, as well as the knowledge sharing among users (Franke & Shah, 2003 and von Hippel, 1994).4 The three types of customer-related knowledge in the present study (i.e., knowledge about customer, knowledge from customer and knowledge for customer) can be employed to depict the knowledge interactions between users and firms in the process of user innovation. Similarly, in both the context of IT-enabled business innovation and the context of user innovation, firms can proactively facilitate and utilize the interaction between them and their customers, as well as the interactions among customers, through purposively providing knowledge for customer. Managerial implications This study also provides several managerial implications to business practice. First, the interactive nature of value creation based on customer knowledge management requires companies go beyond information-processing view of knowledge management. That is to say, business model innovators should view their customers as important knowledge partners and develop an ability of proactively managing and utilizing customer knowledge. As such, our framework may help companies to manage a portfolio of different types of customer knowledge and identify the opportunities of gaining benefit from bridging customer knowledge management and business model innovation. Second, this study indicates that companies should actively deploy IT to enhance communication and value co-creation with customers, and strategically leverage IT to capture value. As shown in the case analysis, the case company benefited from adopting a multiple-layer and multi-stage approach in IT implementation to enable business model innovation. Limitations and future research directions Despite its contributions for academics and practitioners, this study has several limitations that need to be considered. First, the study is mainly based on a single case analysis of TAIN. Thus, additional and multiple case studies in other markets and sectors (e.g., manufacturers in the process of servitization), will help to generalize the findings in the present study. More and more manufacturers today are reinventing their business model – moving from products towards services and solutions, and adjusting customer–supplier relationships through distributed interactions (Baines, Lightfoot, Benedettini, & Kay, 2009). Such changes in manufacturing sector will provide a good context for further research. Second, this research focuses on the positive side of customer knowledge management on IT-enabled business model innovation. That is why we use the case of a successful company to examine those positive mechanisms in our conceptual framework. Although positive mechanisms have been demonstrated in the case, it is worth noting that in reality there may be some negative mechanisms through which customer-related knowledge could hamper IT-based business model innovation, despite most often an overall positive contribution of customer knowledge management to the value creation of business model innovation will exist. For example, as Christensen and Bower (1996) argued, addressing existing customer needs in established markets may result in ignorance of latent customer value and constrain a firm’s ability of disruptive innovations. Moreover, the integration of customer knowledge into business model innovation may lead to a firm’s dependence on customers and a potential risk of losing know-how (Veryzer, 1998). An interesting future research direction is to explore such negative effects of customer knowledge management by using less successful cases. Finally, CKM requires organizational competence to make full use of customer knowledge and to fulfill the promises of superior customer knowledge for company performance and competitive advantage (Rollins & Halinen, 2005). As such, managing customer knowledge for business model innovation demands a new competence of managing a complex portfolio of knowledge from customer, knowledge about customer and knowledge for customer. Therefore, examining the components, antecedents and consequences of customer knowledge management capability would be an interesting and important issue for future research on IT-enabled business model innovation.