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

'The profound research effort and the farsightedness of the theories elaborated make this book an essential guide to innovation through collaboration. As a matter of fact, many of the techniques described here are being leveraged by IBM today to improve the relationship with its customers.' - Guido Gerlotti, Vice President, ibm.com Global Web Sales 'Prandelli, Sawhney and Verona fuse real world illustrations of customer driven innovation with rigorous academic analysis. As a virtual knowledge broker in the automotive marketplace, Edmunds has experienced firsthand what Prandelli, Sawhney and Verona have so insightfully described. I applaud them for sharing these insights with managers the world over in such an actionable and perceptive manner.' - Avi Steinlauf, President of Edmunds.com 'This book is one of the only books that I have read which gives the answer to winning in hypercompetitive markets. Using customers as a source of continuous innovation is key to success in rapid change, fast paced environments. Product advantages are not sustainable, so new product advantages must be generated every day. The book gets it and you will too if you read it!' - Richard A. D'Aveni, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, US 'Customers have become a critical innovation partner for companies in many industries. At the same time, new information technologies have made such collaborative innovation with customers more feasible and cost-effective. Prandelli, Sawhney, and Verona's book resonates this important theme and contributes to our understanding of the associated management concepts and practices. Definitely a valuable book - for both academic researchers as well as practitioners!' - Satish Nambisan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US 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.