IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO.
3, AUGUST 2020
There’s More Than One Perspective to Take Into
Account for Successful Customer Integration Into
Radical New Product Innovation: A Framework and
Research Agenda
Fiona Schweitzer , Ellis A. Van den Hende, and Erik-Jan Hultink
Abstract—Over the past few decades, the impact of customer
integration on radical new product (RNP) innovation has been
extensively investigated. To date, this important topic presents in-
consistent empirical findings that must be converged. In this paper,
our systematic literature review addresses these inconsistencies by
taking a consolidated view of customer integration’s effects on the
development of RNPs. This extensive review of 153 empirical pa-
pers has two main objectives. First, we provide the primary reasons
for inconsistent findings by scrutinizing the operationalizations of
customer types (i.e., current customers, potential customers, ordi-
nary users, or users with domain-specific skills) and RNPs (i.e.,
technological innovativeness, or both technological and market
innovativeness) used in the studies, as well as the different per-
spectives on customer integration [i.e., customer-based idea evalu-
ation, participation in direct and indirect idea generation, research
and development (R&D) partnerships with customers, having a
customer orientation, and disseminating customer knowledge via
R&D-marketing collaborations]. Second, we present a synthesized
view on factors in the sphere of the innovating company and the
customer that influence customer integration’s success along three
phases of the radical innovation development process (i.e., dis-
covery, incubation, and acceleration). Finally, we present avenues
for future research and discuss managerial implications of our
synthesized view.
Index Terms—Cocreation, customer integration, customer ori-
entation, literature review, new product development, new product
development (NPD), project success, radical innovation, radical
new product (RNP), user involvement.
I. INTRODUCTION
USTOMER integration into new product development
C (NPD) is a high-priority topic in the innovation manage-
ment field [1], [2]. Integrating customers into NPD is generally
believed to provide vital information about customer needs and
requirements because innovations that satisfy customer needs
Manuscript received June 25, 2018; revised October 30, 2018 and December
26, 2018; accepted January 8, 2019. Date of publication February 13, 2019;
date of current version July 16, 2020. This work was supported in part by FH
OÖ. Review of this manuscript was arranged by Department Editor L. Santiago.
(Corresponding author: Fiona Schweitzer.)
F. Schweitzer is with the Grenoble Ecole de Management, Univ Greno-
ble Alpes ComUE, 38000 Grenoble, France (e-mail:, fiona.schweitzer@
grenoble-em.com).
E. A. Van den Hende and E.-J. Hultink are with the Delft University of Tech-
nology, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands (e-mail:,e.a.vandenhende@tudelft.nl;
H.J.Hultink@tudelft.nl).
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813
are likely to sell [3], [4]. The value of integrating customers is
widely accepted for incrementally new products (INPs) [5], [6],
while it is less clear regarding radically new products (RNPs)
[7]–[10].
Practitioners often claim that customers are too conservative
and lack the necessary skills and knowledge to contribute to the
successful development of RNPs [7], [11]. For example, Steve
Jobs allegedly built his most innovative products by ignoring the
voices of current and potential customers allegedly based on his
belief that market research is unsuitable for RNPs [12]. Seagate,
a dominate player on the 5.25-inch drive market in the 1970s
and 1980s, briefly looked into the 3.5-inch drives market in the
early 1980s, asked their current desktop customers whether they
found these drives attractive, received negative response, and
abandoned the idea. They did not study the relevance of these
drives for potential customers outside their current markets,
such as laptop manufacturers, and it turned out that the latter
customers found the 3.5-inch drives attractive, and thus Seagate
left tremendous growth opportunities to their competitors [13],
[14]. Together these examples foster the perception of customer
integration biasing RNP decision making and hampering the
blossoming of the creative buds that make RNPs.
However, there are also companies who have successfully
collaborated with customers for their RNPs, like 3M, who ap-
plied the lead user concept to cocreate technologically innova-
tive medical equipment [15]. Lego too, reached out for their
community of dedicated adult Lego enthusiasts (i.e., users with
domain-relevant technical skills), and these customers advised
Lego to use a larger selection of sensors in Lego Mindstorm
(i.e., a technological innovation) as this would allow more vari-
ability. Building on these customer insights contributed largely
to Mindstorm’s profitability [16].
An overview of the growing literature on customer integration
into RNP shows an equally divided picture. Some researchers
found that integrating customers into NPD contributes to RNP
performance [17], [18], while others found a negative relation-
ship [19]–[21]. This inconsistency is troublesome as it is hard
to provide practitioners proper advice without a clear under-
standing of the links between customer integration and RNP
performance. Researchers and practitioners alike need to bet-
ter understand why customer integration in RNP development
works in some cases and fails in others.
814
We shed light on this topic by taking in one sense a broader
perspective on the phenomenon, and in another sense a narrower
one than previous reviews [6], [22], [23]. Our approach is nar-
rower because we limit our review to articles on RNPs. This
focus is relevant because prior research has demonstrated that
RNP development typically follows other rules and performance
logics than the development of INPs [24]–[26].
Our approach is broader, as we draw on different literature
streams that discuss both customer integration methods (ranging
from concept testing with customers, to customer idea genera-
tion, to indirectly identifying needs via latent needs identifica-
tion, to R&D partnerships and similar partner networks between
manufacturers of b2b products and their customers) and organi-
zational customer integration strategies (i.e., having a customer
orientation and disseminating customer knowledge in the or-
ganization via R&D-marketing collaborations), while previous
literature reviews focused mainly on particular aspects such
as the creative potential of customers [22], or a general cus-
tomer orientation strategy of companies [6]. Furthermore, we
use a systematic, qualitative approach [27], [28] to review em-
pirical findings from quantitative as well as qualitative studies.
Thus, for RNPs, we study the impact of different perspectives
on customer integration (i.e., customer integration methods and
customer integration strategies) on the customer integration-
performance link. We define customer integration into the in-
novation process as all competences and activities required to
directly or indirectly use customers’ input to create RNPs, and to
appropriate value through these innovations. We use the generic
term customer for any current/potential buyer/user of a prod-
uct/service as the reviewed papers predominantly used the term
customer, and not user or consumer. For selecting and categoriz-
ing papers, we followed the definition of RNPs as products that
are new concerning the applied technology and the target mar-
ket, incorporating high technological and market uncertainties
[24], [29].
We will now describe the procedures that we applied to iden-
tify and categorize the 153 papers, which we included in this
systematic review. Next, we systematically study the customer
integration-performance link to understand why and when cus-
tomer integration was found to have a positive, negative, or
insignificant effect on RNP project success. The results from
our literature synthesis will highlight the relevance of scruti-
nizing the customer type on which the study focused, the focal
RNP operationalization, and the customer integration perspec-
tive studied. Based on these findings, we develop a frame-
work that depicts successful customer integration’s roles in
three phases (i.e., discovery, incubation, and acceleration) of
the RNP development process. These synthesis sections also
provide several promising avenues for future research and mul-
tiple implications for innovation managers aiming to develop
successful RNPs.
II. METHOD
We established our research corpus in a five-step procedure
described by [27] and [28]. First, we identified a range of
keywords (see Table I) to search for studies that deal with
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020
customer integration in radical innovation projects listed in
the EBSCO and the Science Direct databases, identifying 419
papers.
Based on these papers’ abstracts, we divided them into three
groups: one containing relevant papers (Group 1, 98 papers),
one considered irrelevant (Group 2, 237 papers), and one in
which the abstract contained insufficient information to judge
whether or not a paper was relevant (Group 3, 84 papers). The
key criterion for a study’s inclusion was that it dealt with cus-
tomer integration into radical innovation as the major theme.
We limited our review to peer-reviewed academic journals and
excluded conference papers, trade journals, or working papers,
to ensure that the papers were of a sufficiently high quality.
Table II contains the selection criteria details.
In step 4, we read all papers in Group 3, and classified them
into either Group 1 (41) or Group 2 (43) based on the afore-
mentioned criteria. This screening resulted in our retaining 139
papers.
Fifth, we used snowball sampling [32] to find additional rele-
vant papers, i.e., we read the papers in Group 1 and added refer-
enced papers (14 papers) to this group that we had not found in
our initial database query. This procedure generated a final list
of 153 empirical studies, which formed the core database for our
analysis. The studies were published in 43 journals, of which
a substantial amount is listed in the Financial Times Research
Rank (FT.com, 2016), 35 have an impact factor above 1.34 in
2017, and 39 have a score of 2 or higher in the 2018 Academic
Journal Guide from Chartered Association of Business Schools
in U.K. See Table III for more details on listings and citation
scores.
We categorized the empirical papers according to common
elements used in previous reviews (i.e., journal/year of publi-
cation, definition and operationalization of key terms, empirical
method used data of the empirical setting such as industry back-
ground and company size) [6], [23], [33]. For the definition
and operationalization of the key terms, we captured customers,
employed customer integration perspective, RNP, and RNP per-
formance of customers in separate codes. Similar to other sys-
tematic reviews that compared articles by building on a diverse
range of influencing factors [34], we discuss these factors in
terms of an aggregated set of categorizations, which we used
when coding the papers. Detailed table available from the first
author upon email request.
While meta-analytic statistical procedures provide reliable
results with homogeneous data, qualitative meta-analytical ap-
proaches provide a structured and inductive method of inter-
preting and synthesizing heterogeneous data [30], [35]. Since
the identified studies varied in terms of customer integration
perspectives, definitions of customers, definitions of RNPs, and
RNP performance measurements, a qualitative approach was
considered more appropriate to identify fine-grained differences
between conceptualizations and to deduce explanations for in-
consistent findings. Quantitative reviews tend to exclude po-
tentially relevant but rarely investigated factors if they do not
meet threshold requirements for statistical analysis [35], [36].
The qualitative approach allowed us to investigate an as diverse
as possible set of potential influencing factors systematically,
SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION
TABLE I
KEYWORD LIST FOR ARTICLE SEARCH
leading to more fine-grained insights into customer integration’s
positive or negative effect on RNP performance.
III. SYNTHESIS: CUSTOMER INTEGRATION AND RNP
PROJECT SUCCESS
From a strategic management perspective, the key goal of
any business activity is to create an appropriate value [37]–
[39]. Value creation relates to the surplus a business activity
generates in terms of the positive difference between benefits
for a customer and cost [40]. Value appropriation refers to the
portion of the created value that the company actually cap-
tures in terms of the profit generated through the value creating
offering [41].
Developing and launching RNPs is one such business activity.
Customer integration can contribute to this activity in three key
ways. First, customers can provide insights into their needs and
can provide feedback on the extent to which an RNP helps to
satisfy these needs [42], [43]. Second, customers can contribute
solutions information by providing their creativity and knowl-
edge in the process of developing RNPs. Third, customers must
eventually be willing to pay and adopt the RNP, once launched,
at a price that allows the innovating company to appropriate
value in the form of financial profits. While the third contribu-
tion only happens after the RNP has been launched, the inte-
gration of customers into the innovation project as providers of
needs or solutions information may influence customers’ adop-
tion intentions. For instance, customers who are integrated from
the outset of an RNP project may become active promoters of
these products after launch [44], [45].
Yet, customers’ abilities for this threefold contribution to
RNP projects’ success can be compromised. The reviewed
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815
papers identified problems both in the customer sphere and
in the sphere of the innovating company that limit successful
customer integration. Key problems in the customer sphere in-
clude the provision of inaccurate concept evaluation information
[46], [47] (i.e., inaccurate feedback on needs) as well as a fail-
ure to provide innovative technological solutions information
[48] (i.e., hampered creativity). Factors in the innovating com-
pany’s sphere include shortcomings in the choice of customer
integration method [49], the selection of customers [50], or the
way in which the generated knowledge from customer integra-
tion activities is processed [51]. Table IV presents the reviewed
empirical studies’ findings concerning customer integration’s
effects on RNPs project success. This table groups the ways in
which the empirical studies define RNP project success in three
categories: needs identification, innovativeness, and financial
performance. Needs identification summarizes customer inte-
gration’s ability to provide the innovating company with the
necessary information to understand an RNP’s potential cus-
tomers’ needs. Innovativeness refers to customer integration’s
contribution to increasing the innovating company’s ability to
come up with a radically new solution to a problem. Financial
performance measures the realized success of an RNP on the
market as captured by an RNP’s relative sales, market share, or
return on investment [52].
Table IV provides ample evidence of the inconclusive em-
pirical findings concerning customer integration, demonstrating
that customer integration can provide or fail to provide its in-
tended contribution of improving an RNP project’s success. At
the same time, these empirical findings motivated us to dis-
cover the reasons behind these inconsistencies. Our systematic
review shows that the customer type selected for integration,
816 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020

TABLE II
PAPER SELECTION CRITERIA

the RNP operationalization, and the employed perspectives on
customer integration strongly impact the link between customer
integration and RNP project success.
IV. SYNTHESIS: THE CUSTOMER TYPE
Fig. 1 presents the various customer types that the empirical
research has investigated.
Some studies only dealt with integrating an innovating com-
pany’s current customers into RNP development [14], [53].
In this paper, we refer to current customers for studies that
conceptualize customer integration as integrating the view of
customers who currently buy from the innovating company. A
second group of studies included all potential customers who
fall in the future target group for the RNP. As indicated in Fig. 1,
these customers comprise current customers and a subgroup of
individuals who are currently noncustomers [45], [54].

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SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION 817

TABLE III
JOURNAL AND PAPER INFORMATION: RANKINGS, CITATIONS, AND PERSPECTIVES

Other studies focused on the role of integrating users with
domain-specific skills. These are skills that users possess in a
specific area, enabling them to provide meaningful contributions
in this area [55]–[57]. Such individuals are rare and potentially
difficult to identify (as indicated by small circles in Fig. 1)
and are either current customers, potential customers, or users
who fall outside the target group for the RNP (as indicated by
scattering the small circles in Fig. 1). The most prominently
researched customer group in the domain-specific skills section
was lead users, (i.e., users who experience needs in a new and
important area earlier than the majority of customers, who
benefit decisively from having this need satisfied) [15].
Finally, a group of studies focused on ordinary users. These
studies investigate business-to-consumer (b2c) markets, and nei-
ther exclude current customers nor define criteria to ensure
that these individuals are potential customers. Consequently,
ordinary users are equivalent to consumers in general, and
represent the broadest view on users. Integration of ordinary
users via online idea competitions is thus synonymous to unre-
stricted crowdsourcing approaches in the open innovation liter-
ature. Ordinary users are, however, also often used in concept
testing studies, where it is unclear whether the sample actually
comprises current customers, potential customers, or users with
use experiences.
Analyzing the results of the empirical studies based on differ-
ences in their definition of customer types, we find that studies
that understood customers as current customers tended to find a
negative effect of customer integration on RNP project success
[19], [58] as opposed to those that studied potential customers
[59], [60] and users with specific skills [61], [62].
A company’s current customer orientation is associated with
a responsive, short-term focus on these customers’ articulated
needs. It includes strategies to retain current customers, at
the detriment of opening up to potential customers [63], [64];

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818 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020

TABLE IV
OVERVIEW OF EMPIRICAL FINDINGS ON CUSTOMER INTEGRATION’S POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON RNPS

Notes: + = positive effects, – = negative effects, x = insignificant, c = curvilinear effects.

Note for Tables IV–VI: The numbers in the table do not add up to number of reviewed papers, because some studies measured more than one RNP project
success indicator. Other studies measured the effects of different designs of a specific customer integration measure (e.g., responsive vs. proactive customer
orientation), showing that one design has a positive effect on RNP, while another has a negative effect. We added these studies into the list twice, once
with a “+” and once with a “-“.

Empirical studies that included users with domain-relevant

Fig. 1. Different empirically investigated customer types.
a myopic quest to maximize current profits via incremental
innovations and low-risk projects [4], [65], and competence ex-
ploitation and adaptive learning via the refinement and extension
of existing knowledge [63], [66].
Conversely, a company’s orientation toward potential cus-
tomers is associated with a proactive observation of new mar-
kets [54], [60], [67], [68], a long-term orientation [9], a focus
on acquiring new customers [63], a readiness to cannibalize
existing products [69], and a readiness to challenge existing as-
sumptions about their markets [21], [70], [71]. This orientation
toward potential customers has been found to contribute to RNP
project success, since it allows for the generation of new market
insights and the acquisition of new competences [72]–[74].
The compelling logic in these studies is that entering new
markets with new offerings by understanding future cus-
tomers’ potential needs inevitably provides more market growth
potential than catering to existing markets by better understand-
ing current customer needs. Yet, some studies found that a cur-
rent customer orientation has positive effects on RNP project
success [75]–[77]. A factor that influences the contributions of
current customers to RNP project success may be the attrac-
tiveness of the current customer market, in terms of competitive
activity, market size, and market growth. Technology leaps that
allow companies to provide their current customers with more
attractive products may turn out to improve a company’s fi-
nancial performance more than catering to a new market with
potential customers, at least in the short and medium terms.
skills focused on their direct participation in idea and concept
development, and provided evidence of the value of such indi-
viduals as providers of solutions information. These individuals
may have specific skills, such as technical skills in areas distant
to the innovating company’s internal skills, helping the com-
pany to find innovative technical solutions to challenging prob-
lems [15], [78], [79]. Only a few studies attempted to identify
domain-specific skills beyond lead users [61], [80] and allude
to the relevance of additional domain-specific skills (e.g., emer-
gent nature, technological reflectiveness). These studies have
opened the field to future research into a variety of domain-
relevant skills sets that rigorously compares their contributions
to RNPs in various empirical settings. Domain-relevant skills,
such as haptic information processing [81], or people’s tendency
to lose themselves in a story [82], could be relevant in this regard.
Our literature review also indicated that the superiority of
either ordinary users or users with domain-specific skills may
depend on the problem type for which an innovating company is
seeking solutions. When generating first rough ideas for RNPs,
ordinary users seem to be the key [17], [76]. When more mature,
elaborated input on ways to realize a particular idea in the form
of a technically feasible prototype is needed, ordinary users tend
to fail to deliver meaningful input [50], [83], while users with
domain-specific skills deliver [79], [84].
Moving from solution information as the contribution of users
in the RNP process to needs information, findings in the inves-
tigated empirical papers are inconsistent. Considering product
category expertise as a domain-specific skill, some papers find
that users with strong product category expertise have superior
knowledge of this product category and its trends, which makes
their feedback to RNP concepts more reliable than that of or-
dinary users [46]. Yet, drawing on prior experience can hinder
comprehension and can generate wrong expectations regarding
the ways RNPs should be used in cases where RNPs function in
different ways than current market offerings [85]–[87]. In such
cases, the RNPs do not fit product experts’ domain-specific
knowledge structures, and ordinary users may provide more
useful unbiased needs information [88].
Studies that investigated customer integration in the form
of R&D partnerships with corporate customers suggest that
companies benefit from partnering with current customers as
familiarity, or strong ties, facilitate the exchange of sticky,
tacit knowledge, but this may also reduce RNP project success

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SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION 819

TABLE V
OVERVIEW OF EMPIRICAL FINDINGS ON USER INTEGRATION’S POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON RNP DIVIDED BY USER TYPE AND RNP
OPERATIONALIZATION

Notes: + = positive effects; – = negative effects; x = insignificant; c = curvilinear effects (inverted u).

owing to knowledge redundancy [89], [90]. At the same time,

partnering with less familiar customers (or weak ties) increases
opportunities for generative learning [91], [92], allowing access
to distant knowledge. While both knowledge types are relevant
for radical innovation, no clear conclusion can be drawn from
the current empirical studies as to when to choose one customer
type or the other.
Table V provides an overview of findings organized for dif-
ferent user types. A major shortcoming of the extant empirical
studies is that many studies [93], [94] failed to provide clear
explanations of the studied customer type(s). The lack of rigor
in customer type definition may be responsible for some of the
inconsistent results across studies.

V. SYNTHESIS: RNP OPERATIONALIZATION
We found that the definitions and operationalizations of an
RNP vary largely across the focal studies. Some studies [73],
[95], [96] captured RNPs as technologically radical products.
Such products build on new technological principles that often
enable large performance enhancements. Other studies referred
to RNPs as those high in both market newness and technological
newness, using terms such as discontinuous innovations [47],
[97], really new innovations [61], [98], [99], or breakthrough
innovations [100]–[102]. These innovations require potential
customers to learn about the product and its functioning if they
are to fully appreciate and embrace the RNP’s benefits. Fig. 2
illustrates this difference.
While the understanding of technological innovativeness was
similar across the studies, the definitions of market innova-
tiveness were heterogeneous. Some studies understood mar-
ket innovativeness as delivering new benefits to customers
[103], while others stressed that market innovativeness is high
when customers need to interact with these products in ways
that contradict the ways in which they used to interact with
existing products, rendering prior knowledge futile or even
counterproductive [104].
The findings of studies that define RNPs as technologically
innovative products differ from those that capture radicalness
by including technological and market innovativeness in their
conceptualizations. RNPs that score high on technological in-
novativeness benefit from their closeness to current customers
and their in-depth understanding of these customers’ needs [65],
Fig. 2. RNP operationalizations in investigated papers based on market and
technological newness.
[75], [105], [106]. The reasons for the positive link between the
current customer focus and RNP performance for technologi-
cally radical innovations may be that the closeness to these cus-
tomers facilitates the gathering of information about customers’
tacit needs [107]. Furthermore, current customers’ indicated in-
terest helps to gain the company-internal backing necessary for
investments in such projects [108].
The studies that defined RNPs as products that score high
on both technological and market innovativeness often found a
negative impact of current customer integration on RNP project
success, notably when RNPs failed to meet the current cus-
tomers’ immediate needs, requiring considerable relearning ef-
forts from customers that rendered their prior investments in
knowledge, competences, and resources in current product op-
tions obsolete [101], [109]. Such sunk costs, as well as RNPs
that performed worse than current products on features rele-
vant to them, are likely to negatively affect current customer
integration endeavors. Under such circumstances, current cus-
tomers are likely to reject RNP ideas when asked for their
opinions.
Given the key role of the operationalization of radical inno-
vativeness, it is surprising that many studies failed to provide
detailed information on the operationalization of this construct
[67], [110]. Such studies asked respondents to indicate, for in-
stance, the “% of total sales from radical products introduced by

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820
your firm in the last three years (less than 5%, 5–10%, 11–15%,
16–20%, >20%)” [67] without explaining to respondents what
they understood by radical innovations. So, in these studies, in-
novations that are technically new, and those with high technical
and market newness may be included under radical innovation,
blurring the differences between these two conceptualizations
in our paper.
VI. SYNTHESIS: THE CUSTOMER INTEGRATION PERSPECTIVE
We identified six “perspectives” on customer integration in
the included empirical papers. Four perspectives include spe-
cific customer integration methods, such as concept testing, lead
user workshops, or ethnographies. Two perspectives are orga-
nizational perspectives (i.e., a customer orientation perspective,
and an R&D-marketing collaboration perspective). Our paper
shows that these perspectives are organizational prerequisites for
the successful implementation of customer integration methods.
Thus, the combination of these (types of) perspectives provides
important reasons why customer integration for RNPs is some-
times beneficial and sometimes detrimental to RNP success.
Most of the empirical studies studied customer integration
from a single perspective. The few studies [44], [50], [110],
[111] that included multiple perspectives are case studies that
described customer integration carried out throughout a spe-
cific radical innovation project. The identified perspectives do
not aim to be mutually exclusive. Moreover, as can be seen in
Table III, these perspectives resemble somewhat separate lit-
erature streams. For instance, 24 out of 43 journals published
about one customer integration perspective just once or twice.
Thus, 19 journals published about two or more different per-
spectives. To conclude, separate literature streams are present,
which demands integration.
The first perspective examined customer-based idea evalu-
ation using needs information as the key concept to measure
its effect on the success of a radical innovation. These stud-
ies discuss the challenges of gathering reliable feedback on
current/potential customer preferences for radical innovations
[112], [113]. For instance, these authors found that customers’
inability to categorize RNPs [87], [88] and to imagine future
product use if these products strongly deviate from available
market options [114], [115] leads to uncertainties when evaluat-
ing RNPs [112], potential customers rejecting RNPs in concept
tests [47], [112], and unstable preference statements in consec-
utive concept tests [46]. INP concepts are less prone to such
risks and uncertainties, performing better in concept tests than
RNP concepts. Thus, concept test results stimulate innovating
companies into continuing the development of INPs to the detri-
ment of RNPs, although the latter may find a market with more
growth and profit potential. In other words, such concept tests
result in missed opportunities for successful RNPs [116], [117].
The second perspective focused on users’ direct integration
into idea and concept generation, and measured their effects on
radical innovations using innovativeness as an indicator. Em-
pirical studies have investigated ICT-enabled idea competitions
with users [118], in lead user workshops [62], [119], in creativity
sessions with users [56], or in informal and occasional personal
exchanges with potential customers [44]. With these methods,
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020
the innovating company seeks to gather company-external skills,
knowledge, and experiences in order to generate RNP ideas [17],
[76], and to find technical solutions for realizing RNPs [111],
[120]. These studies largely find that customer integration has
a positive role, since it produces novel and original ideas [48],
[76] that provide higher customer benefits [61] and sell better
[118] than internally generated ideas. However, some studies
found a negative impact [83] of direct customer integration on
RNP project success, and propose that this is due to choosing
the wrong customer types for the task (i.e., current customers).
The third perspective describes methods in which cur-
rent/potential customer integration indirectly serves idea or
concept generation. These studies use innovativeness, needs
identification, and financial performance as measures of the suc-
cess of an RNP. When using these methods, companies gather
information on current and potential customers’ latent needs, for
instance, by observing current customers [42], [121], studying
use difficulties with existing products [44], and learning from
potential customers’ early experimentation with prototypes
[122]–[124]. Inspired by these insights, an NPD team generates
ideas and improves concepts for radical innovations that help
to satisfy the identified latent needs. The reviewed papers also
found that customer integration through these methods helps to
retrieve hard-to-obtain information from customers, which—in
turn—positively contributes to RNP success.
The fourth perspective in the literature focused on R&D part-
nerships with current customers, and included different cooper-
ation types, such as networks, alliances, and other RNP-focused
co-development projects. These studies looked at innovative-
ness and financial performance measures to assess R&D part-
nerships’ contributions to the success of RNPs. These studies
empirically found that current customer integration positively
affects RNP performance, as long as the relevant knowledge is
shared [96], [125] and opportunistic behavior, such as infringe-
ment on intellectual property [126] or prior customers becoming
future competitors [127] are held at bay. In addition, power rela-
tions, company size, and competition in an industry were found
to impact R&D partnerships with current customers’ effects on
RNP success. A current customer’s high power over an innovat-
ing company can lead to strategic subservience and inflexibil-
ity [128], [129], hampering RNP performance. Yet, studies of
entrepreneurial ventures found that integrating large corporate
companies who are first current customers on which a venture
is highly dependent can also be beneficial for RNP performance
[95], [130]. Possibly, customer integration is successful despite
high dependency when powerful, big current customers reduce
market risk, for instance, by giving a new venture legitimacy
and through assuring purchase of attractive quantities of the final
product. Indeed, it seems to be beneficial for young b2b ventures
to turn one large company from a potential to a current customer
rather than seeking to please many potential customers [131].
The fifth perspective is an organizational perspective on cus-
tomer orientation. It is understood as the strategic value that
a business unit, corporation, or NPD team assigns to customer
insights [132]. Studies within this perspective investigated inno-
vativeness and financial performance measures to capture RNP
success, and present an inconsistent picture of customer in-
tegration’s effect on RNP success. In these studies, customer
SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION
orientation’s impact on RNP success varies largely, depending
on the specific customer orientation style and measure. Re-
sponsive customer orientation, which refers to retrieving needs
information from current customers, exerts a negative effect on
financial performance. Proactive customer orientation, which
refers to identifying latent needs of potential future customers
and working with users with specific skills, shows a positive
one relationship [133]–[135]. These studies also reveal that
customer orientation positively affects the performance of an
RNP when it enables exploratory market learning (i.e., the
acquisition and use of knowledge from outside the organiza-
tion’s current customer and competitor boundaries), but not
when it stimulates exploitative market learning (i.e., the acqui-
sition and use of information within the firm’s current expertise)
[70], [74].
Finally, the sixth perspective entails R&D-marketing collab-
orations. This organizational perspective on customer integra-
tion investigates the dissemination of customer knowledge in
the organization via interaction between the R&D function and
the marketing function, and its impact on RNP project suc-
cess. These studies perceive R&D as the unit that receives
customer information indirectly via the marketing department.
Marketers disseminate the acquired knowledge to R&D [136],
providing needs and solutions information, decreasing market
uncertainties regarding RNPs, and allowing current and poten-
tial customer needs to be translated into product specifications,
resulting in increased RNP success as measured by financial
performance [25], [137], [138]. Most studies found that internal
R&D-marketing collaboration positively impacts RNP project
success. Those studies that found a negative impact attribute this
to a short-term focus of the marketing department, which may
lead to inter-departmental conflict [139], and the quest for prod-
ucts that fit current customers, while ignoring potential future
customers [9], [140].
Table VI reports in how far customer integration’s effects
on RNP project success varied based on the empirical paper’s
customer integration perspective. Studies investigating the two
customer integration methods of direct customer participation
in idea or concept generation and indirect idea or concept gen-
eration via customer interaction largely found positive effects
on RNP project success [76], [141], [142]. The studies that
investigated customer-based evaluations of RNP ideas or con-
cepts often found negative effects [47], [112]. For the other
perspectives (i.e., R&D partnerships with customers, customer
orientation, and disseminating customer knowledge in the or-
ganization though R&D-marketing collaboration), a tendency
toward more positive effects was observed.
VII. SYNTHESIS: STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE
EMPIRICAL METHODS
The extant empirical research on the different customer in-
tegration methods built on different empirical research designs.
Studies investigating idea and concept evaluation of RNP ideas
and concepts gathered information mainly at the project level
and via experimental studies (19 studies ran experiments). While
these studies provide high internal validity, it is unclear to what
extent their results can be reproduced in real-world settings.
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821
A key weakness of these studies is that they seem to take for
granted that 1) customers’ RNP evaluations in concept tests
are compromised due to customers’ inability to imagine RNPs
and their future usage, and that 2) these negative concept test
evaluations led companies into sifting out RNPs while filling
the new product pipeline with INPs. Therefore, other empirical
studies investigated ways to increase customers’ positive atti-
tudes toward RNPs in concept test situations via visualization
techniques [113], [114]. However, it remains unclear whether
these evaluations result in de facto launches of positively eval-
uated RNPs, and whether the concept test resulted accurately
mirrored the eventual RNPs’ market receptions.
The studies that investigated direct customer participation
via idea and concept generation studied the participation at the
project level and applied a diverse repertoire of research designs,
including cross-sectional survey data, (longitudinal) case stud-
ies, and experiments. The studies that focused on indirect idea
or concept generation via customer interaction mainly applied
qualitative case study research. Many of these studies demon-
strated external validity in the form of de facto turnover data of
RNPs generated via customer integration [118].
Empirical research into indirect methods of customer inte-
gration in RNP idea and concept generation via latent needs
identification also focused on the project level. This research
suffers from methodological one-sidedness, since all but one
study [143] were based on case evidence. Furthermore, the case
evidence mainly described the early stage of an RNP’s inno-
vation project, where latent needs information is gathered. The
methods that were used to transform the acquired information
into a new product idea and an RNP (e.g., ranking, sorting,
and selection of various—potentially conflicting—latent needs)
were not clearly discussed.
In studies of R&D partnerships with customers, data were
gathered with qualitative and quantitative cross-sectional in-
terviewing and surveying techniques at the company, business
unit, and project levels, focusing on perceptional insights from
key informants in the innovating company. The studies on
R&D-marketing collaboration mainly applied cross-functional
quantitative survey data. Finally, the studies on customer orien-
tation predominantly took a company-level or business unit per-
spective and used quantitative cross-sectional surveys to study
customer integration’s impacts on RNP project success.
Irrespective of the specific customer integration method in-
vestigated, most empirical studies of customer integration build
on cross-sectional study designs and studied short-term conse-
quences of customer integration on RNP project success. Future
research should examine how customers’ motivations to con-
tribute novel ideas evolve over time, how these contributions
relate to whether they feel appreciated rather than exploited or
ignored, and how these contributions influence customer inte-
gration’s contributions to RNP project success. For instance, the
use of users as a cheap workforce could pay off in the short term,
but may be detrimental from a longer term perspective. Users
who feel that an innovating company benefited excessively from
their ideas without being appropriately compensated may turn
their backs on the company, may actively campaign against the
company via social media channels, or may even channel their
future ideas to competitors.
822 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020

TABLE VI
OVERVIEW OF EMPIRICAL FINDINGS ON CUSTOMER INTEGRATION’S POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON RNP DIVIDED
BY USER PERSPECTIVE

Notes: + = positive effects; – = negative effects; x = insignificant; c = curvilinear effects (inverted u).

Furthermore, the long-term behaviors of ordinary users who

propose ideas they wish to use themselves may differ from those
of expert users, who provide ideas because they expect to receive
a financial reward or peer recognition. The first customer group
may feel scorned if a company does not realize their ideas [144],
while the second group may turn their backs on the company
when they feel that they have not received fair compensation.
In this regard, companies’ behaviors in previous interactions
(e.g., explaining why a certain idea was not used, offering to
realize an idea as a customized product instead of develop-
ing a standardized product for the main target market, paying
contributing customers attractive, flexible, sales-based compen-
sations) can impact on contributing customers’ motivations to
repeatedly contribute useful ideas for RNPs. In this context,
future studies would benefit from incorporating relational per-
formance indicators (e.g., company-customer relationships) as
mediating measures for the links between customer integration
and RNP project success.
Furthermore, longitudinal studies could investigate the roles
of customer integration along different RNP introduction pat-
terns. One pattern could be for companies to first target an
innovative customer niche with a radical prototype, and then to
further develop this prototype by learning from niche customers’
interactions and adapting the radical prototype for a better fit
via incremental innovations, while extending to the mass market
slowly as the learning increases [145]. Another pattern could be
to plan the launch of a radical innovation in a longer term future
while directly addressing the mass market with minor innova-
tions that customers understand, but preparing the market step-
by-step to move up the ladder toward the radical innovation.
Identifying such patterns would involve changing the radical
innovation’s perspective from a one-product-centric view to a
view that spans several product generations. Such longitudinal
studies also allow to look at market-based performance indica-
tors, such as sales and market share, at different points in time,
for instance, one, five, or ten years after introduction.
VIII. SYNTHESIS: EMPIRICAL STUDIES ALONG DIFFERENT
RNP PROJECT PHASES
In this section, we merge the findings on customer types,
RNP operationalization, and customer integration perspectives.
To structure our synthesis, we map the findings of the empirical
Fig. 3. Synthesized view on factors in the sphere of the innovating company
and the customer that have a positive or negative effect on the value of customer
integration in the three phases of RNP projects.
studies along the three phases of an RNP project: discovery,
incubation, and acceleration [146], [147].
Fig. 3 captures the merged perspective along the three phases
and highlights the central influencing factors we identified. In
this framework, we view two of the six perspectives on cus-
tomer integration as organizational prerequisites to successful
customer integration. Their execution influences 1) the type of
information that the innovating company looks for when relat-
ing to customers; and 2) the way the information is distributed
and used inside the innovating company. The other four perspec-
tives focus on the way the data are retrieved when interacting
with customers, and their execution immediately impacts the
type of information the company retrieves from the customer
interaction.
In the discovery phase, an innovating company searches for
new business opportunities. To successfully navigate this phase,
the company needs exploratory skills and should employ ac-
tivities that identify potential customer needs, understood as
“problems in need of a solution” [147], [148]. In this phase,
customer integration methods include direct and indirect idea
generation methods. Our literature review indicates that current
customer integration is beneficial for technologically advanced
new products but detrimental for breakthrough innovations that
score high on market newness as well. For the latter group
of RNPs, prior research found that orienting toward potential
customers is essential. One explanation is that gathering in-

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SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION
sights from such new and unknown customers elicits generative
learning processes and competence exploration. Taken this fur-
ther would mean that user heterogeneity would be beneficial as
the diversity of their contributions spurs creativity. Yet, there
might be a tipping point, insights may become conflicting with
one group of customers asking for something, while others ask
for the opposite. Another downside of integrating too many het-
erogeneous potential customers in the discovery phase of break-
through innovations may be that the innovating company lacks
trust and legitimacy in the eyes of these customers, resulting in
their reluctance to provide valuable insights.
Furthermore, current customer integration may not be as fruit-
ful as integrating potential customers when certain context fac-
tors prevent current customers from embracing RNPs. Such
context factors could be prior investment in solutions that are
incompatible with the RNP, the need for unlearning existing
practices in order to use the RNP, and high satisfaction with cur-
rent offerings. In such cases, current customers may be reluctant
to contribute to NPD. In a b2b context, such reluctance may be
stronger than in b2c markets, as potential future users are typ-
ically competitors of current customers, and existing business
customers may have little interest in contributing to an RNP that
their competitors already use. A stronger focus on the specifici-
ties of customer integration on b2b markets could uncover such
influencing factors.
Our literature review also shows that ordinary customer inte-
gration is beneficial in the discovery phase as it helps to uncover
their latent needs and gather inspirations for RNPs based on
understanding these users and their needs better. It is unclear
whether integration of users with specific-skills could outper-
form ordinary customer integration. Lead-users, as one group
of such users, may not do the right job here, because their be-
havior and needs may not represent those of an attractive future
market for the innovating company. This draws our attention to
the relevance of future research looking at other relevant skill
sets users should have to be valuable contributors in the discov-
ery phase. Table VII provides an overview of propositions and
research questions for the discovery phase.
The incubation phase develops initial ideas into business pro-
posals. In this phase, a company seeks to reduce the technical and
market uncertainties, and aims to develop a functional prototype
and test its market acceptance. Customer integration methods
include direct and indirect concept generation methods, concept
evaluation via concept testing, as well as R&D partnerships
with corporate customers. We propose that the integration of
users with domain-specific skills, notably technical skills that
are distant to the innovating company’s existing skill set, al-
low the innovating company access to solution information that
helps to address technical uncertainties in their concept. While
customer integration studies univocally suggest this proposition
[62], [120], [142], [149], a question for future research is if users
with technical skills are superior to other company-external ex-
perts. In lead user studies, there seems to be some overlap in
definitions as lead users include problem solvers from analo-
gous markets who are not part of the innovating company’s
potential future customers [62], [150]. Scrutinizing differences
and similarities between both groups is relevant, because the
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823
innovating company may need different methods of motivating,
finding, and integrating them. For example, users with technical
skills may be more interested in having their need solved and
getting early access to the RNP. External experts with technical
skills might be more interested in building business relation-
ships and profiting financially from working with the innovating
company.
Another proposition for the incubation phase is that ordinary
customer integration for evaluating breakthrough innovations
is detrimental if the users’ ability to imagine the RNP is not
encouraged through specific concept test interventions (e.g.,
narratives, simulation). While research so far focused on devel-
oping and refining intervention methods that increase ordinary
users’ understanding of an RNP, future studies could study the
value of artificial intelligence and digital technology for concept
test interventions, and explore if such interventions also work
for other user types (e.g., users with domain specific skills)
and other tasks (e.g., for gathering solution information). Ta-
ble VIII captures the propositions and research questions for the
incubation phase.
The acceleration phase prepares a radical innovation for roll-
out. In the acceleration phase, the company prepares its internal
and external infrastructure and invests in the radical innovation’s
market launch. Companies carry out activities to ensure broad
market access and quick sales growth to win critical mass fast.
At the end of this phase, the RNP should provide substantiated
evidence that it can generate predictable revenues in a foresee-
able future, can be managed via routinized and institutionalized
processes, and can compete with more incremental innovations
for internal resources [147], [151]. Speeding up this phase and
scaling up quickly is pivotal for RNPs success [152].
Our synthesis identifies a gap within the customer integra-
tion literature for this phase. The studies that investigated cus-
tomer integration at the project level predominantly zoomed in
on the first two phases of radical innovation projects, but inade-
quately captured customer integration’s roles in the acceleration
phase. This is unfortunate since research found that companies
have the most competences in the discovery phase, while they
struggle with the back-end of radical innovation [146]. We sug-
gest that customer integration can play a vital role in this last
phase, during which companies need to relate to customers in
order to address the most attractive markets, and must edu-
cate prospective customers about the innovation’s key benefits.
Thus, we call on researchers to focus on understanding the meth-
ods, processes, and patterns in which customer integration can
improve the efficient and effective management of the RNP’s
acceleration phase.
Future research could explore the impact of user involve-
ment in the earlier phases of the RNP innovation process on
the success of activities in the acceleration phase. For instance,
preliminary qualitative findings indicate that the integration of
employees from a customer company into the discovery and
incubation phases strengthen personal relationships and foster
these employees’ identification with the innovating company
and their commitment to the innovation. Customers who are
integrated in earlier stages of the NPD could thus turn into
spokespeople who promote the innovation in their company and
824 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020

TABLE VII
PROPOSITIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR THE DISCOVERY PHASE

TABLE VIII
PROPOSITIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR THE INCUBATION PHASE

beyond [44], [45], thereby helping the RNP’s market diffusion.
Little is known about the likelihood that different customer
integration activities could spark promotion activities, or the
conditions under which customers can play effective ambas-
sador roles in promoting an RNP [45], [106], [153]. It would be
interesting to learn about the characteristics that customers re-
quire to become credible promoters. In a b2b context, customers
who are market leaders or who are known for their innovative-
ness could have the required credibility to act as promoters
or ambassadors. In a b2c context, innovativeness and opinion
leader roles could matter the most.
Future research on promotional effects may also study cus-
tomer integration’s reputational effect. Prior research on INPs
showed that customers who are not themselves involved in cus-
tomer integration tasks have more positive feelings toward a
company if they know that the product was cocreated with
users. Nonetheless, customer integration can also backfire; for
instance, luxury fashion items are perceived as less prestigious

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SCHWEITZER et al.: THERE’S MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER INTEGRATION
TABLE IX
PROPOSITIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR THE ACCELERATION PHASE
and less desirable if cocreated [154]–[156]. In an RNP context,
integrating customers could contribute to building trust in the
new technology, but it could also backfire. Customer integra-
tion may leave potential customers with the impression that a
company “needs help” from others because it lacks own com-
petences. Hearing about a car manufacturer that is developing
brakes with ordinary users may cause customers to believe that
these brakes are inferior in comparison with professionally de-
veloped ones. However, if an innovating company integrates its
leading business customers as reference customers, this could
build trust in the technology, while integrating end customers
to generate technical solutions may have a negative reputational
effect. In addition, the interplay of customer integration, RNPs
and governmental regulations requires future research. RNPs of-
ten lack social and legal legitimacy. Customer integration could
facilitate an RNPs gain of such legitimacy [157]. For instance,
working with potential customers on trials, such as test drives of
autonomously driving prototypes by users in pilot cities, could
make RNPs not only more appreciated by users but also pull
in governmental decision makers—certainly, only if the tech-
nological functionality excels. To close the identified gap in the
literature, Table IX presents several propositions and questions
for future research on the acceleration phase.
Finally—and as an overarching issue for customer integra-
tion in all NPD phases—we propose that company’s customer
orientation (i.e., the extent of responsive or proactive orienta-
tion) and R&D-marketing collaboration influence the intensity
at which the customer view is incorporated, the choice of users
that are integrated, the ways user information is shared, and
finally the extent to which such information is acted upon. In
line with the previous research [158], [159], we thus call for a
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825
better understanding of the organizational-level and individual-
level prerequisites in the innovating company that influence the
extent to which customer integration is beneficial or detrimen-
tal to RNP success. For example, understanding attitudes of
decision-makers toward the evaluation of user-generated ideas
that look beyond the not-invented-here-syndrome [160], [161]
may play a pivotal role. Innovating companies that encourage
their decision makers to take a creative attitude toward user-
generated ideas understand such ideas as inspirations, combine
different ideas, and build on them based on an improved under-
standing of the latent needs engrained in user-generated ideas,
may profit more from integrating them than those who encour-
age strict stop-go evaluations in rigorous internal Idea Evalua-
tion Committees as sifting out high amounts of user-generated
ideas may lead decision-makers to prefer the familiar [162].
To bring clarifications on these topics, future research should
look into ways in which potential customers’ RNP ideas need
to be gathered, presented, and interpreted to encourage their
uptake. This could result in not taking up and acting upon user
insights that could potentially fuel RNP success. The last row in
Tables VII–IX present research questions that were derived from
these propositions.
IX. CONCLUSION
This systematic literature review makes three important con-
tributions to customer integration theory. First, it alludes to dif-
ferences in user type definitions, RNP operationalizations, and
customer integration perspectives explaining inconsistencies in
prior empirical findings. Second, it reconciles key findings
across empirical studies to derive at propositions on customer
integration success. Third, it indicates a gap in our knowledge
826 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 67, NO. 3, AUGUST 2020
on the role of customer integration in the acceleration phase of
RNP projects and defines research avenues for closing this gap.
The major aim of our systematic review was to inspire and fuel
future research that contributed to our understanding of the con-
ditions that nurture successful customer integration for radical
innovations. However, our paper also offered practitioners im-
portant insights into the various customer integration factors and
the different ways in which their specific design had either pos-
itive or negative consequences for the performance of an RNP.
For practitioners, we showed that the reason for customer
integration to not deliver the intended positive consequences
for RNP development lied often in the sphere of the company,
and not in the user. The systematic review provided insights in
the ways in which customer integration could fuel the innova-
tiveness of R&D teams, provide valuable feedback on RNPs,
and increase the financial performance of RNPs. At the same
time, this paper highlighted that customer integration was not
only about choosing “the right customer” for integration, but
also about having the right internal resources and capabilities.
Such internal factors included motivation, vision, and exper-
tise including method knowledge on customer integration (e.g.,
mental simulations in concept tests rather than traditional con-
cept tests) and future market visioning (e.g., ability to assess the
long-term attractiveness of different potential target groups and
selecting customers based on this assessment).
The propositions in Tables VII–IX do not only aim to encour-
age other researchers to formulate interesting future research
questions but also provide useful and important insights for in-
novation managers on how to use customer input for successful
RNP development. These propositions were presented for three
key stages in the RNP’s development process thereby providing
an important checklist for innovation managers to be successful
in each stage. This paper showed that it matters which cus-
tomers to select in each stage to collect customer insights that
are truly useful to develop an RNP that will meet the future
market demands.
We will close this systematic literature review with a final
important advice for innovation managers that customer inte-
gration is often very useful and important for an RNP’s success
but it is surely not the only route to success. The literature
on Open Innovation strategies provides multiple other avenues
for commercial success. For instance, technology competence
leveraging may be a viable open innovation business strategy,
especially for technologically driven firms that can commer-
cialize their technological competences successfully outside the
current boundaries of the firm.
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Fiona Schweitzer received the Ph.D. degree in business administration from
Vienna University of Economics and Business, WU Wien, Austria, in 2001.
She is a Professor of Marketing with the Grenoble Ecole de Management,
Grenoble, France. She also lectures at FH OÖ. Her academic research focuses
on the role of marketing in new product development, customer integration into
the innovation process, and high-tech innovation’s adoption.
Dr. Schweitzer was the recipient of three Best Paper Awards and has pre-
sented and published her work at various scientific conferences and in academic
journals, such as the Journal of Product Innovation Management, International
Journal of Innovation Management, Creativity & Innovation Management,
Psychology & Marketing, and Research Technology Management.
Ellis A. Van den Hende received the Ph.D. degree in industrial design engi-
neering from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2010.
She is an Assistant Professor of Marketing with the Product Innovation
Management Department, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft Uni-
versity of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. Her research interests include
the new product development process of innovations, and consumer processing
of stories.
Dr. Hende’s research has appeared in the Journal of Product Innovation
Management, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Psychology &
Marketing, and Research-Technology Management.
Erik-Jan Hultink received the Ph.D. degree in industrial design engineering
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 1997.
He is a Professor of New Product Marketing and the Head of the Department
of Product Innovation Management, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering,
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. He was the Founder
and Director of the Master in Strategic Product Design with the Delft University
of Technology, a program that was recently ranked by Business Week as one
of the world’s top design schools. He is Co-Founder of the Dutch chapter of
the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He regularly
consults companies on the topic of new product marketing. His research focuses
on launch and branding strategies for new products.
Dr. Hultink’s work was published in journals such as Journal of the Academy
in Marketing Science and Journal of Product Innovation Management.