dissertation done

I’m relieved to say that my dissertation is done, it was an arduous experience creating it but extremely valuable. I learned a great deal through the creation of this paper especially about motivation it turned out to be about 19,000 words, 80 pages, 89 cross-referenced academic sources.

I will post a summary but I can’t face it right now, here’s the abstract:

This paper asks the question, how does Experience Design contribute to the competitive advantage of e-Business. Our research indicates that it contributes to competitive advantage in three ways:
1. Building relational capital with stakeholders (in this case customers) outside the traditional boundaries of the company, culminating in deeper, more meaningful relationships and increased customer value.
2. Enables co-creation of value with customers generating intellectual capital and increased customer value.
3. Provides a basis for future growth as a rich source of market-based intellectual capital contributing to product and market development.

In e-Business value creation process is changing and so are the resources that are valuable. The value creation process is mediated by network technologies that allow stakeholders to participate in the value creation process that are outside the traditional organizational boundaries. The ability for the value creation process to include new participants also provides access to new resources that need to be created and managed in novel ways, but can create significant value.

Experience Design is the key activity in enabling these market-based assets and then harness them for competitive advantage.

From this we proposed three theories:
1. The four universal characteristics of Experience Design
2. A two-factor theory of customer motivation based on customer experience
3. A model of the organization and its relationship to Market-Based Resources.