The Neglected King: The Customer in the New Knowledge Ecology of Innovation

Despite the universal mantra that “the customer is king,” the role of the customer has so far seemed to have been confined to a passive recipient of products. Recently, however, this traditional perception has been challenged. On the one hand, users are increasingly appreciated as reflexive actors who are actively involved in the evaluation, modif ication, and configuration of products. On the other hand, beyond the established repertoire to access external knowledge through interorganizational networks, firms increasingly attempt to harness user knowledge. These two concurrent shifts do not result in a smooth convergence. Rather, they open up a highly contested terrain in which habitual distinctions between the producer and user are blurred. In this article, we map the evolving terrain of user-producer interaction in innovation processes. Specifically, we contrast more traditional approaches to incorporate customer knowledge with an emerging class of innovative user-producer relationships, provisionally dubbed “co-development.” We then propose a typology of different modes of codevelopment that is organized along two dimensions: the degree of user involvement and the prevailing locus of knowledge production. This typology seeks to capture the heterogeneity of co-development approaches and to provide a conceptual template for further empirical research on user involvement in innovation.