What are the Challenges and Enabling Technologies to Implement the Do-It-Together Approach Enhanced by Social Media, its Benefits and Drawbacks?

Abstract

Inspired by the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement, the Do-It-Together (DIT) collaborative approach was successfully trialed in 2018, hence opening the door to the application of User Driven Innovation for realizing product individualization. In the meantime, other megatrends like digitization, social media, sustainability, the circular economy, and collaborative consumption have pushed toward a renewed DIT approach for tackling social and societal issues. This article reports on an exploratory study dedicated to the identification of challenges and enabling technologies to implement the DIT approach, as well as its benefits and drawbacks. This study is based on an extensive literature review that allowed us to identify 162 articles resulting in 38 most relevant selected articles and seven Product Life-Cycle (PLC) stages. Based on these PLC stages, all identified DIT challenges, benefits and drawbacks were collected from previous empirical work described in the selected articles. In terms of findings, relevant DIT challenges, benefits and drawbacks are consolidated in distinct tables with proper references. Regarding the enabling technologies for DIT implementation, only immersive technologies at the earlier PLC stage are addressed. The implementation analysis within other PLC stages and enabling technologies like Additive Manufacturing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and IoT have to be carried out in order to identify their particular benefits and drawbacks; however, this analysis is left to future work. This study has also revealed a lack of empirical studies addressing negative impacts while there is a plethora of published studies focusing solely on positive impacts.