A Study of The Influence on Applying Open Innovation to Customer Service Satisfaction

[[abstract]]With global economy rapidly developing in recent years, enterprises have constantly adjusted their business strategies accordingly. As enterprises used to operate businesses closed-internally, they have made a little connection with external creativities and innovations. Therefore, Henry Chesbrough (2003) proposed “Open Innovation Theory”, suggesting that enterprises should open out previous closed organization boundaries and cooperate with external competitors and teams to get innovative ideas. The idea of “Open Innovation” has made much of attention in Europe and the United States, but related researches in Taiwan are still at the initial stage. There are plenty of studies on customer satisfaction but few under the framework of open innovation, and that comes of the beginning of this study. This paper presents a framework by using literature researches as the theoretical basis, and structures empirical supports by using both case study with experts and statistical regression analysis on questionnaires with customers from three well-known franchises coffee shops in Taiwan: Starbucks, 85°C, and IS Coffee. According to the findings of this study, the applying of open innovation for service industry has imposed profound positive impacts on service quality, product quality, product prices, environment factors and brand images. Furthermore, it shows that open innovation application makes the greatest impact on product quality, then on the environment quality, and after that will be the product price. Meanwhile, the evaluation of product quality and service quality affects customer satisfaction, and in turn will change the popularity of customers visiting. Based on this understanding, the paper suggests that business operators should regard product quality and service quality as the primary consideration to appealing to customer’s re-consuming. Hopefully, the derived empirical results can provide some better insights for entrepreneurs in business transformation as well as future researchers in the relevant fields