Collaborating with Customers to Innovate: Conceiving and Marketing Products in the Networking Age

Collaborating with Customers to Innovate explores the collaborative potential offered by customers in digital environments to enhance the effectiveness of new product development. The internet has created the problem of an increasing need for innovation in a context where information is transparent, competitors are just one click away, and product lifecycles are shrinking. However, as the book demonstrates, the internet also provides the solution - enabling new forms of value creation with customers and an efficient way to harness distributed competences. Specifically, the authors highlight the role that digital environments play in allowing firms to engage customers in product design and testing. They develop a major review of web-based tools for marketing interaction and then explore the opportunities for sustaining innovation through collaboration beyond the customer-firm relationship.

The book enriches an important debate in management and in academia on the new product development process. It encompasses marketing approaches and is sharply focused on the opportunities that digital technologies have created for involving customers in collaborative innovation, and actionable recommendations for putting collaborative innovation to work. The book will appeal to academics as well as practitioners in marketing and new product development as well as MBA students on marketing and new product development courses.

Emanuela Prandelli, Associate Professor of Management, Bocconi University, Italy, Mohanbir Sawhney, McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, Northwestern University, US and Gianmario Verona, Professor of Management, Bocconi University, Italy