Research On Incentive Mechanism Of Innovative Customers From The Perspectives Of Income Equity And Motivation Equity

With the advent of economic globalization and customer-centered knowledge era,enterprises have recognized that "buyers" is no longer the only role of customers,and customers can play a valuable role in organizational innovation and value creation.The strategic role of customers is increasingly recognized and more and more enterprises actively attract them to participate in the process of product or service innovation.The role of the customers has also changed radically.They are evolved from passive demand goals to co-developers,co-producers,and co-creators of new product development.They are called"innovative customers" and their participation is called "customer participation".Customer participation can increase the satisfaction and sales of new products,shorten the development cycle of new products,improve the degree of product innovation and reduce the research and development cost,etc.,which has a positive effect on the improvement of enterprise product value.It is very important to establish an effective incentive mechanism to encourage innovative customers to participate in order to win sustainable competitive advantage.Therefore,scholars believe that innovative customers should be regarded as "partial employees" or "part-time employees" and should be encouraged to participate in the development of new products.However,innovative customers are not as consciously involved in the work as the ordinary employees.And innovative customers don’t put in "no difference in time and effort" as the ordinary employees.In the process of participating in innovation,innovative customers receive services dynamically and actively,and participate in product innovation process with a large amount of information,knowledge and resources.Compared with ordinary employees,innovative customers pay more attention to equity perception.When setting up the incentive mechanism for innovative customers,how to integrate the equity perception of innovative customers into the incentive model as a key factor?How does equity perception affect the setting of incentive mechanism?How to develop effective incentive mechanisms(compensation contracts)?These are the problems that enterprises are eager to solve.In addition,literature reviews show that although more and more scholars have introduced the theory of equity preference into the study of incentive theory,more and more scholars pay attention to the importance of equity preference in the establishment of incentive model and the implementation of incentive mechanism,it is still rare to integrate the theory of equity preference into the research on the specific enterprise management practice-incentive mechanism of innovative customers.This is contradicted by the increasingly prominent strategic role of innovative customers in the practice of enterprise management.Therefore,this study introduces "equity preference" into the design of incentive mechanism for innovative customers according to the particularity of innovative customers’participation behavior and equity perception,starts from the perspectives of "income equity"and "motivation equity",comprehensively considers the internal psychological factors and external reward factors,and integrates the risk aversion and participation cost factors of innovative customers into the model to discuss the setting of the optimal compensation contract types of innovative customers.Based on a comprehensive review of the existing achievements of innovative customers’ participation in enterprise innovation and the application of equity preference in the incentive field,this study focuses on "how does the psychological preference of innovative customers affect the setting of the optimal salary contract under the circumstance of income equity" and "how does the psychological preference of innovative customers affect the setting of the optimal salary contract under the circumstance of motivation equity",and constructs the innovation customer incentive mechanism model from the perspectives of"income equity" and "motivation equity".Four sub-studies are put forward and the mathematical analysis method is used for reasoning.Finally,the theories derived from the model are verified by the data collected from the survey,and the analysis conclusions of the model are verified by the case in the management practice.The results show that:From the perspective of income equity:(1)Under the same type of compensation contract,innovative customers pay less attention to the input of their participation cost,and the incentive effect of the contract is more positive.(2)The selection of the optimal compensation contract type for innovative customers means to solve a three-aspect tradeoff,including the incentive effect of risk cost,expected loss of unfair and equity preference.(3)For innovative customers with a higher degree of equity preference,if they have a higher degree of risk aversion,the enterprise should set up a team compensation contract;If their risk aversion is low,the enterprise should set up the perfect team contract.(4)For innovative customers with a low degree of equity preference,the relative performance contract is the best.From the perspective of motivation equity:(1)In the case of horizontal reciprocity,enterprises can control the cost of encouraging innovative customers to invest high effort level through interdependent compensation contracts.When the risk aversion degree of innovative customers is low,the optimal compensation contract is relative performance contract,and when the risk aversion degree of innovative customers is high,the optimal compensation contract is team compensation contract.(2)In the case of vertical reciprocity,first,when an enterprise does not screen innovative customers,it can demonstrate its altruism by providing a salary contract with relatively high basic salary but weak incentive intensity.Second,altruistic enterprises do not have to pay higher total expected salary than egoistic enterprises to induce reciprocity.Altruistic enterprises pay higher expected total compensation than egoistic enterprises only when the innovative customers respond with above-average effort.Third,due to some innovative customers do not be reciprocal to altruistic enterprises,altruistic enterprises should screen the conditional altruistic innovative customers by providing compensation contracts which have the following characteristics:showing the enterprise’s altruism in the form of compensation contract,having stronger incentive intensity,higher expected total compensation and lower basic salary.In theory,this study reveals the relationship between equity preference and the best incentive mechanism of innovative customers,clarifies the optimal combination of innovative customers’ compensation contract types and innovative customers’ types,and enriches relevant researches on the identification and selection of innovative customers.In addition,by applying the contract theory to design the optimal compensation contract and adopting the assumptions of organizational behavior,the incentive mechanism can explain the reality better and have stronger practical guidance ability.In practice,it can help enterprises implement customer innovation value management better,provide guidance for enterprises to develop customized compensation contracts,and help enterprises create the environment to enhance incentive effect.