Entrepreneurship in Solar Energy: Discovering the Product Meaning and Designing a Product, Service and Business Model

This thesis presents the design of a solar energy product-service-experience combination that could provide solar energy a new product meaning and perhaps encourage Dutch consumers to use (more) solar energy. The project was initiated by the start-up Googreen as a means to explore suitable business opportunities for the company to enter the...

Perceived modernity and product preferences: What matters? Culture or (and) market development

This research looks into the evaluation of product aesthetics in different cultural contexts and it aims to disentangle the prominent influential factor on products’ aesthetic appraisal. The product meaning: modernity is used to evaluate the relationship between consumers’ perception of product appearance and the aesthetic appraisal. For the...

Are modern products curved or angular?: The effect of the prototype shape on the received product meaning

Managers that want to incorporate a pre-defined product meaning in a design need to know how consumers relate product properties to product meanings. In past research the proposed relationships between physical properties and meanings are implied to be robust. This study showed that the physical property ‘curvature’ has a positive effect on the...