Beyond product customization: Towards a conceptual framework for Collaborative Customer Innovation

Modern product customization aims at satisfying customers´ individual requirements by providing customers various customization approaches. Recently, customers, especially lead users, are proven that they can play an active role in product innovation by using their potential user knowledge and creative skills. However, there is an obvious lack of systematic and deep research on customers´ innovation or co-creation in current product customization systems. By customer integration and team collaborative creativity, a conceptual framework for collaborative customer innovation (CCI) is formulated in this paper, which proposes a new customer integrating approach beyond product customization. First, the concept and connotation of CCI are presented by comparing this emergent innovation approach with existing researches. Second, by studying the essential working principle of CCI, technology-driven knowledge spiral collaborative innovation mechanism and an agent-based team working model are formulated and described in detail. To realize customer collaborative innovation, the function structure of the innovation platform of CCI is analyzed and proposed. An innovation platform for household ceramic products is constructed as the application of CCI, and a case study is presented to validate the above principle and working model. The proposed conceptual framework for CCI can be used to build the collaborative customer innovation organization, develop innovation toolkits, and instruct enterprises to realize CCI effectively.