#NOTHING BUT DECOYS HERE OUTGUESS HOW TO#
This article provides a business case which shows how to do that and what implications can be derived for choosing appropriate methods of virtual customer integration. Hence, those criteria have to be elaborated in detail. Establishing these criteria is critical as they directly derive from a firm's innovation strategy. We introduce a frame-work that helps to select the most appropriate method and tool of customer integration, according to the particular requirements of an industrial organization in the design and prototyping stage. However, these methods must fulfill certain require-ments in order to gain competitive advantages from customer integration. The emerging new methods of Virtual Customer Integration represent promising new methods for filling this gap. Interestingly, no method has been developed yet which can help to exploit customers' expertise at exactly those stages in the NPD process where user's wants and aspirations have to be translated into product specifications. In general, methods of cus-tomer integration can considerably improve a firm's knowledge base for new product develop-ment, particularly when customer knowledge can be incorporated, which otherwise remains tacit.
This study exhibits that the methods which enable an active customer integration, compared to methods where customers are integrated only passively in NPD, are more suitable for attaining customer knowledge within innovation development.Ĭustomer integration in new product development processes (NPD) has become a potent idea in the innovation literature and enjoys increasing attention in business. By systematically analyzing these methods, we found that there are methods within which customers are involved only “passively” in NPD, as well as methods that enable a more “active” customer integration. This research identifies a total of 15 methods with the help of a systematic literature review. However, little is known about these methods’ effectiveness and efficiency to transmit customers’ knowledge to firms. In order to internalize customer knowledge, in theory different methods are discussed. Customers’ input to NPD typically reflects their needs and desires (need information) but may also represent suggestions describing how ideas can be transferred into marketable products (solution information), in some cases it even leads to radical innovations (leading edge information).
From knowledge management perspective, customers’ input to NPD is manifested in different forms of knowledge. In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge as well as experience and creativity potential gained by regular product usage.
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