The notion of managers increasingly customising information as a decisional resource to suit their needs is an adaptation to information user needs which could be anticipated, given the complex production and market environments which have altered the way enterprises now function. Advances in information technologies, combined with the plummeting costs of information production and retrieval and the falling costs of hardware, are facilitating user design input into information pro- duction. The need for real-time user-focused information, and the concurrent avail- ability of technology, has accelerated the transition of process information functions within firms. What has been less predictable is the growing input of customers in the design of products. Many companies today cannot envisage product design without the customers ’ input in a very fundamental way to the core of the product’s design (Bettencourt and Ulwick, 2008; Gulati, 2007).
Historically , markets moved from being producer-focused to somewhat consumer-driven during the 1960s and 1970s across many large firms with the con- sumer who initially accepted both price and product forms becoming, to a degree, a price-maker (Hippel, 2005). The entry of low-price Japanese products in particu- lar into Western markets offered consumers choices and forced many firms to price more competitively to retain or grow their markets further. Producers focused on product-making and customers became price-makers in some industries.
However the products being purchased from the Far East competed not just on price but also on quality. Higher-quality products, offered initially at high prices, became more competitively priced by Western producers in the late 1970s. This stemmed especially from a realisation that enhancing quality in production environ- ments did not necessarily increase costs: high quality did not necessitate a cost trade- off. Thus customers sought higher quality at existing prices and so firms reacted by competing on a higher-quality/lower-price footing (Dale and Plunkett, 1999).
Some level of parity was reached with high-quality, low-priced products being offered by many competing firms across many markets.
Ultimately , high quality/low price became a starting point for economic viabil- ity in some industries. During the 1980s, many firms then sought to increase their competitiveness by enhancing the level of customer service provided. In the 1990s, firms found it important to offer value while offering high-quality products and high customer service, but continued to face competition based on competitors providing more product characteristics and a more differentiated, sophisticated and demand- ing customer base. This required localised customisation of otherwise standard products across the globe. Engaging the customer in defining the product was key to competitive appeal, but opportunities for doing so were limited.
The rise of the internet from the mid-1990s provided novel opportunities for firms to increase their interface with customers. Although the customer over the prior three decades evolved from being a price-taker to a price-maker and, to a degree, ultimately influenced quality, product diversity and customer service, it was not until the advent of e-business technologies that companies could develop a way of competing by turning customers into product-makers. Today a large number of organisations no longer regard customers as product-takers. For instance, many social internet sites rely entirely on user-generated content.
Firms can operate websites where customer experiences increase interfacing and consumer engagement, and enhance the customer’s ability to define the product and, indeed, to extend what counts as the product. For instance, an auction site such as eBay offers a basic service to make purchases but also enables a ‘ thrill of the kill ’ purchasing experience for the winning bidder. Staging customer experiences has become an avenue for allowing customer input to be coupled with providing entertainment. Amazon.com allows users to inform other users about their views of products and also to cast judgment on Amazon and its affiliate suppliers. The consumer evaluation of products widens Amazon’s appeal as a seller with a unique platform which is difficult for competitors to match. Customers on some travel airline sites can express their wishes concerning a flight and offer a price for the product which the airline can decide to accept or to decline. Other sites allow con- sumers to design their desktops, golf clubs, dolls, etc. online prior to purchase. In such contexts, where customers can influence both the nature of the product and its price, conventions of cost control and cost functions have to be revisited. The roles of costing are likely to change with changes in customer input into organisational activities.
There are other illustrations of internet-based platforms where customer input is especially prevalent. The internet allows digital products to be created. For instance, multi-player online dancing sites allow players to create ‘ avatars ’ (virtual persons) and dance with other such avatars. Dancing takes place via tapping fingers on appropriate keyboard keys or using a USB-attached floor mat for real dancing. Such
strong engagement brings about customer ‘ stickiness ’ to the site and encourages ‘ word of mouth ’ market growth. Other platforms such as Flikster.com, Facebook.
com, MySpace.com and Wikipedia.com invite users to generate content which they then ‘ consume ’ . Consumers thus co-innovate products and services with producers and become ‘ pro-sumers ’ (Tapscott, 2009, p. 11). Such companies ‘ must organise a constantly shifting global web of suppliers and partners to do the job ’ (Colvin, 2008, p. 16). The partners can include customers.
Many successful companies are now less inclined to invent entirely new products and services independently of consumers. Rather, they create the products with the customer and seek to generate a new experience in the process. This arises in part because no enterprise can fathom all the unique experiences sought to be created and experienced by customers.
Although enterprises may not pre-design the consumer experience with the pro- duct, they still invent the product concept and orchestrate achievement of the pro- duct’s potential via the consumer. Thus, Apple Inc invented the iPod but users cre- ate their own experiences with the product by loading it with independently created content: podcasts, shows, music, etc. Facebook.com likewise developed the plat- form for users to stage their own unique experiences. But both involved both ‘ cus- tomers ’ and other ‘ suppliers ’ who create software applications. The user experience is effectively ‘ co-created ’ (Prahalad and Krishnan, 2008). Co-creation of products is not a choice but a necessity for many business models because the product choices are infinite and cannot be conceptualised or delivered by one ‘ producer ’ .
This movement necessitates management control premises which depart from the traditional model of organisations themselves monopolising the design pro - cesses to create products and services and manage owned resources. For the finance function, this implies the production of information relating to the provision of co- created products where innovation potential is not owned entirely by the firm. It also means that the product of the finance function itself must be subjected to co- creation with information users. This requires some rethinking of cost management systems. Costing the product and its production is subject to different sources of input and prior analyses. The product revenue potential is also not directly associ- ated with the source of revenues where, for instance, advertisers pay for juxtaposi- tion alongside the ‘ product ’ . Search engine results and ‘ ad-links ’ are examples.
Industrial firms like LEGO have attempted successfully to engage in ‘ distributed co-creation ’ , whereby customers are invited to suggest new products and be finan- cially rewarded if their ideas prove profitable. Likewise Peugeot sought design input from the public and built a demonstration model of the winning design, which ulti- mately led to the creation of a video game involving a consumer-designed vehicle.
Such a model only partially engages the user in contributing to product develop- ment; digitised products can offer much more scope for greater customer partici- pation. The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia for instance, is created entirely by its
users. In such cases, control processes which traditionally are seen to be internal to the organisation must be ceded to networks of participants, including suppliers and customers; online content ‘ quality controls ’ can be mounted by designated users, for instance. Giving control to a mix of users and suppliers is now often regarded as essential within new business models sustained by novel web-based technologies.
IBM has adopted the open operating system Linux for some of its computer products and systems. Linux in this context draws upon a core code base which is continuously enhanced and improved by a wide-ranging community of systems software developers, of which only a minority work for IBM. Thus different com- panies will use co-creation with different mixes of inputs from different parties. But ‘ what facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the web as a partici- patory platform ’ (Bughin et al. , 2008).
Broadly speaking, open innovation and co-creation (Chesbrough, 2006; Prahalad and Krishnan, 2008) will continue to necessitate the rethinking of enterprise control structures. For the management accounting field, there are two immediate effects.
First, sources of revenue may possibly be separated from the product’s costs. Profit drivers may be triggered by consumption but the product consumed may actu- ally have a zero price. Customer input into the product design implies the need to reconsider pricing strategy. In contexts where what is produced is not what gener- ates income, the notion of cost-based pricing becomes much less relevant. Market- based price setting will retain relevance where revenue generators face competition, but the link to organisational cost incursion will remain indirect. Consequently cost allocation will have different objectives where this is undertaken. The disconnect between pricing and product costs (see below) will imply altered cost objects and altered cost management objectives.
The second effect is that while cost containment will continue to be a key con- cern for any organisation, the consumer’s input into product design will re-define cost containment rationales. For instance, a firm may wish to invest large fixed costs to provide a specific and attractive experience for customers, but it may decide to focus, as a consequence of such investments, on customers who are familiar with using web-based platforms and technology. Concurrently, the cost of customer assistance – which may have a high variable cost such as phone lines, messenger and ring-back services – may be pared down. Thus the cost structure will delimit the possible strategies pursuable by a firm. Conversely, the strategic objective of the firm will itself potentially influence the nature of the cost structure. What is clear is that strategy, cost and technology inter-linkages within modern firms today create inter-connections which have not been present in the past. Consequently manage- ment accountants will need to adapt to a broader vision of their role in complex organisational contexts. This could include partnering with managers, rather than simply providing information and being dissociated from decision making and action implementation.