91制片厂

Matthew O鈥橦ern鈥檚 career path has been set since he was in sixth grade.

鈥淎lmost all my friends wanted to be NFL players, and I thought, 鈥榳ell, I think it would be pretty cool to be a professor,鈥欌�� he said.

Years later, as an assistant professor of marketing at the 91制片厂, O鈥橦ern remains on the cutting edge in a highly ranked department, focusing his research on concepts in new product development that will form the future. In particular, he focuses on the benefits of crowdsourcing.

鈥淚 am exploring the benefits that occur when customers create their own new product improvements and offer support directly to their peers,鈥� he said.

O鈥橦ern was inspired to pursue this line of research by the open source software movement. He also had a forward-thinking doctoral advisor who predicted he would be busy in this line of research for years to come. O鈥橦ern aims to help firms better identify the most talented customer creators within their user communities, and better understand the benefits of directly involving customers in new product development or service support.

He has an interesting finding on this front: 鈥淥ne of our studies found that in certain cases, customers who experience a service failure are significantly more satisfied when they receive help from a fellow customer than from a firm,鈥� he said. 鈥淚n that same study, we demonstrated that there are steps that companies can take to make their front-line service employees seem more 鈥榗ustomer-like鈥� and thus reap the same benefits.鈥�