Integrating Customers at the Front End of Innovation

The trend towards open innovation and crowdsourcing inspires new ways of thinking about customers’ involvement in the innovation process, which encourages companies to open up their innovation processes and gain customer insights from people and institutions outside the firm. In order to drive a product successfully from the front end to the next innovation stage, managers need information, which can be either solution information or needs information, that helps them reduce technical and market uncertainties. The customer’s role in the process of gathering information differs according to whether the indirect, and more traditional, approach of integrating the customer (manufacturer active paradigm) or the approach of direct customer integration is chosen, where the creative potential and the tacit knowledge of the user are directly used as innovation input (customer active paradigm). The targets for customer integration have to be set accordingly, and the most suitable market research tool has to be selected, which either can belong to the group of needs-focused research methods or of solution-focused research techniques. This chapter also discusses the issue of how to find the appropriate participants and to encourage them to get involved in the process and how the findings can best be implemented in the company.