Interactions with Customers for Innovation

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the ways in which firms can use their interactions with customers to generate innovations and better foresight future trends in the marketplace. We discuss how the interaction with customers varies depending on the type of innovation the firm is aiming to achieve: Product improvement, product versioning, new product development, and new product discovery. Each of them has distinct knowledge creation challenges in terms of the identification, transfer, and integration of customer knowledge to create innovations that fulfill their needs and preferences.

Keywords: Innovation, customers, knowledge, foresight

JEL Classification: O31, O32