User-Centered Service Innovation for Commercial Vehicles

Abstract

There is no vehicle segment where personalisation is as common, as for Light Commercial Vehicles. These vehicles are used for a large variety of tasks, supported by an ever-increasing number of new services. For Light Commercial Vehicles, one of the most interesting market segments from the perspective of service innovation and product personalisation is the handymen market. Handymen have a very strong relationship with their vehicle, highly specific mobility needs depending on their specialisation, and spend a lot of time personalising their vehicle.

This paper presents the Plugs concept. The Plugs concept is a new open-source approach to deliver personalised services for Commercial Vehicles to the handyman market. The concept was created based on user research and service innovation done by the TU Delft Design School in collaboration with Ford stakeholders from the Research and Innovation Center in Aachen. To deliver a broad variety of personalised hardware- and software-based services, called Plugs, to small handyman businesses in a cost-efficient way, Ford should build a strong open-source platform strategy around the core Ford Transit product, involving third-party developers and handyman lead users in the creation of these Plugs.