Managerial recommendations for advisable envisaged customer integration

Abstract

With the proclaimed change of paradigm, holding that customer integration can no longer be considered a priori a generally advisable practice, innovation managers are faced with an additional burden of decision-making. They ought to decide in every single innovation task whether customer integration would add value in comparison to mere in-house activities or to innovations with the help of other external sources. The rationale for this decision is simple in theory: customer integration is advisable if the prospective benefits gained by it are higher than the prospective disbenefits. In practice, however, such a decision presupposes a variety of other, if smaller, decisions on the factors that influence this balance, e.g. the task in question, the likely benefits, or special risk-reducing measures.