To Schreier the Best Paper Award for the German-Speaking World
If you want to meet all the co-authors of the best article in any field of business administration published in 2010 by German-speaking scholars, visiting Germany, Austria and Switzerland won't be enough. You have to come to Bocconi and be introduced to Martin Schreier, associate professor of marketing, whose The "I designed It Myself" Effect in Mass Customization (Management Science, 56 (1): 125-140, 2010, with Nikolaus Franke and Ulrike Kaiser, both WU Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) won the 2010 Best Paper Award given by the Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft (German Academic Association for Business Research). Compared to this one, other awards he received in the past pale, but you can visit his personal page for the profile of a serial scooper.
Austrian, 33 years old, Schreier joined Bocconi in 2008 as an assistant professor after gaining the PhD and the Habilitation at WU Wien. "In the German system, which embraces Austria, after the Habilitation its time to change your university", he explains, "and Bocconi was my first choice after I met Emanuela Prandelli at a conference and discovered we were working on the same topics: user innovation and customer empowerment". Their cooperation led to joint works and to Schreier applying for a job as assistant professor, which he landed in 2008. A couple of years later he became associate professor.
"All my scientific interests revolve around the idea that customers and users can be more innovative than conventional wisdom suggests", he says.
A first stream, which he's been following with the guide of MIT's Eric von Hippel, aim s at spotting the lead users and engaging them in the innovation process in order to obtain better products for the mainstream market.
Then he shifted his attention towards mass customization, i.e. the ways to allow customers, usually via online toolkits, to fine tune the design of a product to their personal preferences, leading to a technically feasible single unit production. "It's the 'I designed it myself' effect of the Management Science article", he says, "with people willing to pay a double price for the uniqueness of their product".
A third scientific thread – the one he shares with Prandelli and Gianmario Verona – regards the role of online communities in the process of customer empowerment: their involvement, the scholars found, reduces the risk of coming up with unwelcome products and creates a sense of psychological brand ownership and loyalty.
Schreier defines his fourth and last stream of research "full empowerment", referring to cases such as Threadless, the online t-shirts producer which has no internal designers and allows the community to manage the designing process online and to choose the items which will be actually produced. "We conducted an interesting experiment", he explains, "presenting the choice between two very similar designs and declaring that one was the result of a community process, the other the work of professionals. Well, we discovered that, on average, people have a strong preference for the community product, regardless of its actual quality".