Problem-Solving Process with the Users: An Exploratory Case Study in the Early-Stage Game Company

Many organizations tend to neglect user inputs for product development and improvement. However, they should recognize the importance of user inputs because such feedback may become an important source of innovation. User inputs can take various forms, yet in this study, we assume it as taking the form of a 'problem.' In order to understand the mechanism of how the user's feedback in the form of problem gets processed by organizations, we develop a problem-solving process framework, which consists of three stages: 1) problem reception, 2) problem assignment, and 3) problem acceptance. We also propose several factors such as problem representation, importance of user, strategic and technical importance, gatekeeper’s knowledge, and task related factors that may hinder problems from getting processed along the three problem-solving stages. An exploratory case study in the context of an early-stage game company is conducted, and we find that many of the problems raised by the users, in fact, do not reach to the problem acceptance stage in the framework. We also find that some factors seem to influence the hindering mechanism relatively more than the others. We identified firm’s interaction with users as the joint problem-solving process in this paper, and found many important sources of hurdle to this process. Managers should be aware of these intervening factors and try to eliminate these in order to successfully implement the ideas of users. In a very short period of time for this study, 59 important problems were identified for this start-up company. We expect that larger, more established companies should be able to find more important problems for new product development and improvement.