Managing Innovation in Technology Systems to Deliver User Value

This paper develops pleiotrophy analysis further by discussing the integration of user survey into the analysis of technology system consisting of components and user perceived features built up with those components. The paper reports results of a user survey on Pod music player features designed in order to validate the previously used user perceived character set. User survey is conducted as web-based questionnaire that received 18 answers. The answer set is not quite large but considered enough for testing of the survey itself as well as testing of the previously developed improvements to the underlying theory. The questionnaire aims to find out the most used and important features of Pods that can be used as evidence for user perceived characteristics in pleiotrophy analysis as well as in testing the improved version of pleiotrophy matrix. The pleiotrophy analysis combines the user perceived characteristics with the components building up the technological systems inside the Pod music player devices. Each component can be classified either as core or peripheral component depending on their pleiotrophy level. The higher the pleiotrophy level the higher the importance of the single technological component. The improvement of pleiotrophy matrix takes into account also the user preferences as weights assigned to each component and feature. These weights are calculated from the user survey results as weighted means for each feature included in the questionnaire. The results of this study shows that weighted pleiotrophy is usable tool in determining the relative importance of different components building up a product. The concrete improvement the weighted pleiotrophy matrix gives in comparison to normal pleiotrophy matrix is that it brings more granularity to the pleiotrophy levels giving more accuracy to the determination of the importance of different technical components. In further research the user survey can be developed further by the improvement ideas given by this study to research the evolution of technology systems as case study of Pod development between different models of this music player.