Online Customer Integration in New Product Development

Abstract Today, new product development (NPD) is viewed as one of the fundamental drivers of com-petitive advantage of firms. Despite the focus on customer orientation customers are often only called in to make an initial position sensing during new product development processes. Later on, they also effect a continuous validation of solutions generated by enterprises. However, the opportunity of regarding customers as partners of value creation during NPD as well as the chance of actively involving them into the process is often neglected. However, there is a lot of potential of customer integration during the whole process of NPD. Especially, the advent of internet technologies allows a variety of different forms of customer integration during NPD. In this paper we develop a typology of different online cus-tomer integration forms, i.e. Lead-Communities, Lead User-Portals, customer exchange forums, and personalized customer portals. A tentative mapping of different forms of online customer integration to different modes of knowledge generation is proposed. It is argued that knowledge about the potential and possible pitfalls of online customer integration gained during the implementation of such pro-grammes can turn into a competitive advantage.

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