Paper info

Key concepts for building customer references - creation of adomain model for start-up technology companies

Jari Ruokolainen

The paper was published at the 21st IMP-conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2005.

The market for a complex technology product is sometimes called a“reference business”, because the need for references is emphasised bycorporate customers. A first customer reference is especially important for astart-up technology company trying to enter the business-to-business marketwith complex products. This article concentrates on evaluating the conceptsof the customer reference from the start-up technology company’sperspective. Topics relating to customer references are very much underresearched although the topics can be considered important. The currentconcepts concerning the use of the first customer references, in particular,are vague and inadequate, because the subject has scarcely beendiscussed in the literature. The purpose here is to present a domain model,which describes the key concepts and the relationships between theseentities. The domain modelling technique is well-known and widely-used fordefining the concepts of large scale IT systems. The domain modelincreases the understanding of the problem domain by structuring it intoclasses, attributes and relations. This article starts the concepts’identification by introducing an example case. Then the known concepts,close to the topic of this article, are reviewed based on the literatureresearch. Redefinition for the customer reference and definitions for newrelated concepts are introduced.