The role of early customers in the design of radical innovation: the case of software.

Summary The software design process is marked by the modularity of product architectures, which favors the design of innovations by users. However, radical software innovation is carried out by small structures focused on their own technology. These innovative software products must generally be combined with others to achieve marketable solutions. The literature on modularity (Baldwin and Clark, 2000) does not talk about the process that leads to the emergence of a dominant modular design, and is only interested in the processes of de-integration of product architecture. It therefore does not deal with the innovation process, based on independent software designed by different firms, which leads to a multi-actor modular solution. Questions then arise about the innovation process that leads to such a solution. How does the new architecture emerge? How is the innovation process structured? What is the role of the first customers in this radical multi-actor innovation process, and how can they be associated with it? We propose a typology and new terminologies related to the product architecture of a multi-actor software innovation and its different components. We describe the evolution of this architecture up to a stage where its modularization is almost complete, and explain the reasons for this incompleteness. We then analyze the innovation process through the inter-organizational collaborations implemented, and the interactions they generate. We thus observe the emergence of a project structuring. This consists of a definition of project management and a definition of the role and competences of its various actors. Finally, we return to the nature of the contributions of the first clients to the innovation process, and discuss the notion of lead user. We propose to enrich this notion through the definition of four new concepts, which take into account the multiplicity of the contributions of these customers to the process of radical multi-actor software innovation.