Customer integration is an integral element of the innovation process today. Yet, despite the potential for integrating external knowledge into new product development (NPD) processes, companies often fail to benefit sufficiently from customer integration. Research attributes this failure to restricted absorptive capacity, intellectual property concerns, or the “not-invented-here” syndrome but has not yet shown in which different phases of NPD which barriers dominate. To contribute to the discussion on impediments and barriers to customer integration, this authors presents a case study that examines customer integration into different stages of the NPD on the basis on three complementary learning strategies, namely explorative learning, transformative learning, and exploitative learning. The results of the case study can help to sensitise managers for impediments to customer integration throughout their NPD and innovation processes and to overcome typical various types of barriers.
The importance of innovation has grown in recent years because consumers increasingly demand a variety of products and services (Füller, 2006). Firms have responded to this trend with an increased orientation toward the customer (Homburg, Wieseke, & Bornemann, 2009) and particularly with customer integration into the innovation process (Carbonell, Rodriguez-Escudero, & Pujari, 2011). Thus, more and more innovative companies reject the paradigm of an internal, closed research and development (R&D) organisation in favour of a common, collaborative process among companies and external stakeholders, such as customers (Chesbrough, 2003).
Customer integration into the innovation process has been widely investigated (e.g., Bogers et al., 2010, Brockhoff, 2003, Enkel et al., 2005, Kristensson et al., 2002, Lagrosen, 2005, Vargo, 2008 and von Hippel et al., 2011), with a strong focus on the early stages of new product development (NPD). This stream of research has examined many ways to increase the inventiveness and strength of a company’s innovations through collaborative processes with customers. For example, in the early stages of the NPD process, companies might implement a lead-user method to produce useful ideas, and in later stages, they might use product individualisation or mass customisation as forms of customer integration (e.g., Franke et al., 2006, Lüthje and Herstatt, 2004 and Olson and Bakke, 2001). However, from a practitioner point of view still many companies do not sufficiently utilise external knowledge such as the knowledge of their customers (Cassiman & Veugelers, 2006) and are reluctant to integrate customers into core development phases. From a theoretical point of view, this reluctance may be explained by individual-level attitudes such as the not-invented-here syndrome (Lichtenthaler, 2011) or by missing organisational capabilities such as a limited absorptive capacity (Zahra & George, 2002). However, these theories do not explain why reluctance to customer integration is higher for one stage of the NPD than for the other.
In response to this relative lack of understanding, this article aims to identify learning-related impediments to customer integration throughout different stages of the NPD process, a subject that innovation research has been anaemic to in the past. For example, Gassmann, Kausch, and Enkel (2010) consider the side effects of customer integration rather than its barriers, and their results focus primarily on external dimensions, such as dependence on customer views. Enkel, Perez-Freije, and Gassmann (2005) discuss factors that determine the success or failure of customer integration, but they emphasise specific NPD phases and project-level factors. Sandmeier, Morrison, and Gassmann (2010) focus on customer integration throughout the innovation process. However, they compare in-house development with development contractors and do not address impediments to customer integration. Finally, in a recent article on customer integration into service innovation, Carbonell et al. (2011) find that the development stage has no moderating effect on the link between customer involvement and innovation outcomes and conclude that customers should be equally involved in different stages of the NPD. However, they do not provide an explanation for why companies use customer integration to different extents in different phases.
The aim of this article therefore is to (1) investigate what impediments towards customer integration arise along the entire NPD process rather than focussing on specific phases and (2) to determine how these impediments relate to theoretical concepts such as the firm’s absorptive capacity. Because we observe a dearth of research on specific impediments to customer integration into the NPD process, we use an exploratory approach and analyse impediments to customer integration by undertaking a case study in a major German telecommunications company (Yin, 2003). The findings of our research are expected to contribute to theory building in the area of combinative capabilities and absorptive capacity (cf. Gebauer et al., 2012, Lichtenthaler and Lichtenthaler, 2009 and Volberda et al., 2010), so our results are subject to be generalised to theory rather than to description (Lee & Baskerville, 2003). Among others, we found that research into absorptive capacity would benefit from a nuanced view considering the pecuniary and non-pecuniary nature of individual-level attitudes towards the integration of external knowledge.
