Collaborating with customers to innovate: Conceiving and marketing products in the networking age

The book explores the collaborative potential that customers offer in digital environments to enhance the effectiveness of new product development. The Web has created the problem – an increasing need for innovation in a context where information is transparent, competitors are just one click away, and product lifecycles are shrinking. However, the Web 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 focus is on collaborative innovation at the network level, through the leverage of communities of creation, mediated innovation, and open source systems. Actionable recommendations for putting collaborative innovation to work are provided.