Innovation is a key driver of company growth. Innovations have become more complex and
require know how from very different areas. Due to the various knowledge domains, one
company can no longer develop all the competencies to create innovations. Thus, the
innovation process is increasingly a place of interactive relationships between firms and their
various partners in order to source competencies. This results in the establishment of
innovation networks. Innovations are not always successful and especially in the consumer
goods industry high failure rates of innovations are far from being an exception. This leads
firms to analyze needs and wants of actual and potential customers even more carefully and to
integrate them in innovation development. In the networked paradigm described above, this
customer integration measures are increasingly orchestrated jointly by firms.
This paper presents a qualitative research study investigating the future of customer
integration in these innovation networks. Two research fields – customer integration in
innovation development and innovation networks - have been investigated thoroughly. For
innovation networks to be successful a company needs to establish a company culture of open
innovation. The literature review regarding customer integration in innovation development
highlights the importance of the timing and intensity of customer integration as well as the
importance of the integrated customers’ characteristics. Using a set of twelve in-depth
interviews with experts in the field of customer integration and innovation development were
conducted. The objective was to uncover the growing relevance and more active role of
customers within these network types. The experts emphasize that innovation networks are
primarily used for the identification of trends and not for the actual generation of innovations.
The exploratory research results also suggest that there will be a shift from a selective
integration of customers in order to solve specific problems to a continuous information
exchange during the entire innovation process. Regarding customer characteristics, the
experts also propose a shift from the focus on lead users to customers’ creativity and a
stronger involvement of customers from the relevant target groups. Future research should
explore these results by using a more quantitative approach and investigate how to detect
customers’ potential for creativity as well as ways to benefit from this creativity.
Dieser Eintrag ist Teil der Universitätsbibliographie.
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