How Traditional Industries Use Capabilities and Routines to Tap Users for Product Innovation

Overview: While customer-centered innovation has thus far focused on best practices for user-producer collaboration and organizing users to obtain relevant inputs, the internal organization that enables firms to integrate user knowledge into product innovation outputs is less well understood. We analyzed five case studies to derive the innovation routines from firms in traditional industries that employ user knowledge to improve existing products or develop new products. The routines are linked to organizational capabilities relevant for incorporating user knowledge into innovative outcomes. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2021.1891750