Collaborating to create: The Internet as a platform for customer engagement in product innovation

In the networked world, firms are recognizing the power of the Internet as a platform for co-creating value with customers. We focus on how the Internet has impacted the process of collaborative innovation—a key process in value co-creation. We outline the distinctive capabilities of the Internet as a platform for customer engagement, including interactivity, enhanced reach, persistence, speed, and flexibility, and suggest that firms can use these capabilities to engage customers in collaborative product innovation through a variety of Internet-based mechanisms. We discuss how these mechanisms can facilitate collaborative innovation at different stages of the New Product Development process (back end…