Integrating Customers in Product Innovation: Lessons from Industrial Development Contractors and In‐House Contractors in Rapidly Changing Customer Markets

Successful product innovation has increasingly been recognized as an outcome of integrating customers into the new product development (NPD) process. In this paper, we explore customer integration by investigating the continual consideration of customer contributions throughout the product innovation process. Through a comparison of the customer integration practices by development contractors with those of in‐house developers, we find that the iterative and adaptive innovation process structures of the development contractors facilitate the realization of the full customer contribution potential throughout the product innovation process. We also find additional support for the incorporation of open innovation into an organization's NPD activities. Our findings are based on in‐depth case studies of the NPD activities of in‐house developers and product development contractors.