There's More Than One Perspective to Take Into Account for Successful Customer Integration Into Radical New Product Innovation

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the impact of customer integration on radical new product (RNP) innovation has been extensively investigated. To date, this important topic presents inconsistent empirical findings that must be converged. In this paper, our systematic literature review addresses these inconsistencies by taking a consolidated view of customer integration's effects on the development of RNPs. This extensive review of 153 empirical papers has two main objectives. First, we provide the primary reasons for inconsistent findings by scrutinizing the operationalizations of customer types (i.e., current customers, potential customers, ordinary users, or users with domain-specific skills) and RNPs (i.e., technological innovativeness, or both technological and market innovativeness) used in the studies, as well as the different perspectives on customer integration [i.e., customer-based idea evaluation, participation in direct and indirect idea generation, research and development (R&D) partnerships with customers, having a customer orientation, and disseminating customer knowledge via R&D-marketing collaborations]. Second, we present a synthesized view on factors in the sphere of the innovating company and the customer that influence customer integration's success along three phases of the radical innovation development process (i.e., discovery, incubation, and acceleration). Finally, we present avenues for future research and discuss managerial implications of our synthesized view.