A custom collaboration service system for idea management of mobile phone design

Customized collaborative service (CCS) systems are defined as the e‐services transforming a business process into a collaborative service model and aiming to facilitate interactions with customers and assist the providers in dealing with collaborative strategies and activities. The demand for such services has grown rapidly in a shift of people out of the manufacturing mindset into the service‐dominant mindset. For example, the mobile‐phone market now tends to customization rather than commoditization, and customer‐driven design strategies increasingly substitute for technology‐driven design strategies. This trend accordingly urges the mobile‐phone companies to center on a customer‐centric idea management process to assure customer idea originality but also sustain the process feasibility for realistic product design. However, a method to engineer such CCS systems has not been addressed. This article presents a prototype system named iMobileDesign to exemplify a CCS system. We present a new methodology to engineer this CCS system aiming to achieve semiautomated value coproduction with productivity and satisfaction. This method comprises two parts: simple service machine (SSM) and intelligent service machine (ISM). Usage of SSM and ISM would lead to the formation of analysis and design of the CCS system that joins the service provider efforts with their customers for ensuring a customer‐centric idea management process. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.