Collaboration with Customers - Understanding the Effect of Customer-Company Interaction in New Product Development

Customer co-creation is becoming increasingly popular among companies, and intensive communication with the customer is generally seen as a determinant of new product success. However, there is still limited insight into what interaction with customers really is. The most recent thinking argues for an understanding of value-in-context in order to co-create value with customers. The question, then, is how value-in-context can be captured and how this knowledge can be beneficial in the development process. In essence in order to capture this type of information a company needs to interact and communicate with their customers. However, this communication process has not been properly analyzed. In the present study we analyze customer collaboration based on four separate dimensions - frequency, direction, modality, and content - in order to understand the value of customer collaboration. The data comes from a survey of 207 managers with experience of new service and product development. The paper concludes that three of the four dimensions of customer collaboration have a significant positive effect on New Product Development performance and Market Share development.