Open Access

Tabea Urich

• The main purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the customers’ motivation to participate in SAP‘s Influencing Programs and to subsequently generate suggestions for possible improvements. The framework for the domains of interview design, analysis of conducted interviews, as well as the analysis of secondary sources is presented by theoretical analysis of both the involvement of business-to-business customers in the innovation process as well as the nature of motivation. Empirical findings show that customers’ motivation to participate in SAP IPs consists of, in descending order of importance, the following motives: Influencing functionality, understanding functionality, learning about future functionality, contact to SAP, and contact to other companies. The design of SAP’s Influencing Programs is generally in line with the motivation of participating customers. Still, improvements could be realized in terms of customer involvement during the selection process, internal alignment between different Influencing Program teams, and mandatory training of Influencing Program moderators.