Innovating with customers: how to hatch a new type of collaboration

You want to involve your customers more in the innovation process, or at least take better account of their diversity when launching new products or services.

If companies choose to rely on a dynamic community of customers, it's quite simply to access new ideas and test them directly with their clientele. This relational exchange is known as participative marketing.

Before soliciting your customers, you need to get to know them. Here are a few pointers to help you do just that:

• What are the different customer categories?

• Are all customers potential collaborators in innovation?

• At what stages of innovation can you collaborate with your customers?

Companies wishing to innovate at lower risk are increasingly turning to the integration and exploitation of customer knowledge. From this perspective, it's a question of implementing innovation marketing with the customer, whose role is not simply to evaluate the innovation of products already created by the company, but rather to be an actor in the innovation process.

Innovating with customers means optimizing your collaboration with different customer categories, and using their knowledge to support the innovation process and its various phases.