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Offer a new model for identifying effective approaches to gathering, understanding and synthesizing information related to new product needs of B2B customers.

Arthur D. Little, together with the Eindhoven University of Technology, conducted in-depth interviews with over 30 product development leaders in 15 companies across multiple sectors.

When the team interacting with customers is structured appropriately the research showed that “getting it right” can lead to doubling of innovation success rates and have significant impact on R&D effectiveness.

By identifying the degree to which B2B customer needs are clear (expressed) or unclear (latent) and the degree to which technology needs are known (expressed) or unclear (latent), we can start to characterize the most appropriate skill set that a multifunctional product development team will need in order to develop a winning product.

Companies can use an innovative analysis framework to help make informed decisions about how best to organize their teams. The four approaches can be mapped to the four quadrants of a “Customer Needs/Technology Needs” matrix. The study concludes that the benefits are both strategically and financially significant.

New service development relies on the complex task of understanding and anticipating latent customer needs. To facilitate proactive learning about the customer, recent findings stress customer involvement in the development process and observations of customers in real action. This paper draws on theory from market and learning orientation in conjunction with a service‐centered model, and reviews the literature on customer involvement in innovation. A field experiment was conducted in Sweden with end‐user mobile phone services. The design departures from the nature of service that precepts value‐in‐use and by borrowing from relevant techniques within product innovation that supports learning in customer co‐creation. The experiment reveals that the consumers' service ideas are found to be more innovative, in terms of originality and user value, than those of professional service developers.

The aim is to propose a conceptual framework consisting of research propositions concerning the key strategies required for the successful involvement of customers in the co‐creation of new technology‐based services.

The methodology involves a single case study from which data are derived and analyzed using the grounded theory methodology of “constant comparative analysis.” User‐generated ideas for future mobile phone services are collected from four user involvement projects and analyzed at several workshops attended by senior managers from telecommunications firms.

Seven key strategies are identified as being essential for successful user involvement in new product development. Each strategy is described and illustrated in relation to existing theory and presented as a research proposition.

The exploratory nature of the research means that the findings are tentative and need to be confirmed in other settings by other researchers, including quantitative large‐scale studies.

The results of the study provide management with guidelines for organizing successful user involvement projects with a market‐oriented approach.

Despite the increasing popularity of user involvement, little research has examined the conditions required for successful user involvement in new product development. This study makes an original contribution by proposing strategies critical for a successful outcome.

To successfully create customer value, firms must use coherent market strategies and perform value-creating activities that enable them to develop solutions to customers’ needs. However, as firms exhibit differences in how they approach value creation, their market strategies will also differ. These differences among market strategies can be described through different combinations of proactivity and responsiveness, representing each firm’s value-creation logic. This study aims to increase understanding of how firms can improve the effectiveness of their market strategies by considering their associated value-creation logics.

The authors conceptualize market strategies as coherent sets of value-creating activities. While the types of activities within a market strategy are driven by a firm’s strategic orientations, how these activities are performed is influenced by its value-creation logic. With this as the foundation, the authors develop a conceptual typology of archetypal market strategies based on the different value-creation logics that influence them.

The authors propose four distinct market strategies – habitual, visionary, adaptive and ambidextrous – representing unique ways in which value-creation logics influence the formation of market strategies. Furthermore, the authors highlight the need for activities to reflect consistent value-creation logics to create coherent market strategies and the authors provide an exploration of the activities that enable firms to implement different types of market strategies.

The typology expands the concept of market strategy, introducing the idea of a value-creation logic of proactivity and responsiveness, and thus demonstrating the need for more in-depth consideration of the value-creating activities that constitute market strategies to better understand how firms can create superior customer value.

Scholars and professionals are interested in studying customer value in fast-food restaurants. Previous research on the customer value of fast-food restaurants mainly measured the dimensions and relationships of the customer value. However, the research has not examined a method for identifying sources of customer value in fast-food restaurants. Therefore, this study used customer orientation to find customer needs and generate customer value in fast-food restaurants.

This study presents a conceptual framework with six constructs. A questionnaire was used to gather empirical data from fast-food restaurant customers in Greater Cairo, Egypt. The suggested framework was evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity analysis, standardized path coefficients and regression-based moderation analysis.

This study found that proactive customer orientation has a substantial direct and positive impact on customer perceived value. Customer perceived value is also positively influenced by responsive and proactive customer orientations, with customer desired value change intensity acting as a moderator. Customer perceived value substantially impacts customer satisfaction, and the latter substantially affects behavioural intention.

This study offers several suggestions for managers of fast-food restaurants on how to employ customer orientation to find current, latent and future customer desires to provide customer value.

This is the first research in the hospitality industry to demonstrate how responsive and proactive customer orientation may be used to recognize customer needs and provide the desired customer value.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct impact of proactive customer orientation (PCO) and responsive customer orientation (RCO) on word-of-mouth (WoM) and cross-buying (CB). Further, this study tests the mediating role of perceived value (PV) in the relationship between customer orientation (CO) (PCO and RCO) and WoM as well as CB in the context of retail banking in an emerging market, India.

The authors used cross sectional survey research design to collect data from 443 customers of retail banks in India. The authors analyzed the data using IBM AMOS 23.0 taking structural equation modeling approach to test the hypothesized relationships.

The findings of the study suggest that PCO positively influences CB but there is no significant relationship between PCO and WoM. RCO positively influences WoM and CB. PV partially mediates the relationship between RCO and WoM as well as CB. PV does not mediate the relationship between PCO and WoM or the relationship between PCO and CB.

This study shows that managers need to focus on proactive as well as RCO. Further, managers need to adopt RCO in order to ensure cross-buying and promote WoM recommendations by customers. By practicing PCO managers can promote CB. Also, managers will be able to enhance CB and promote WoM recommendations if the value delivered by the bank is perceived to be adequate by customers.

This study contributes to current knowledge in retail banking by testing the relationship between CO and CB as well as WoM through data obtained from customers in an emerging economy. This study also tests the mediating role of PV for the above-mentioned relationships.

Secondary customers often experience secondary vulnerabilities that manifest in family-centred transformative services as other- and self-related customer needs. Yet, a relational perspective on primary and secondary customers’ needs is lacking. The study analyses secondary customers’ needs and their relationship to primary customers’ needs to enhance well-being in customer entities. The service inclusion lens is used to understand customers’ experiences of vulnerability.

The study uses an exploratory approach. The data consists of ethnographic observations and interviews of elderly residents (primary customers), their family members (secondary customers) and nurses in two nursing homes.

Primary and secondary customers’ needs are interrelated (or unrelated) in four ways: they are separate, congruent, intertwined or discrepant. The vulnerability experiences fluctuate in intensity and over time, individually reflecting on these need dimensions.

The study contributes to service research concerning customers’ experiences of vulnerability, secondary customers and their inclusion in services. Primary customers’ service inclusion may increase/decrease secondary customers’ service inclusion and their experience of vulnerability. Moreover, secondary customers’ inclusion is often necessary to foster primary customers’ inclusion and well-being.

Fostering service inclusion and well-being for primary and secondary customers requires balanced inclusion and acknowledging the needs of both groups. Service providers may need to act as moderators within customer entities if discrepant needs occur.

The study addresses the under-researched areas of family members’ customer needs, their relation to primary customers’ needs, experiences of secondary vulnerability and context-related vulnerability.

This study aims to investigate how market orientation (MO) motivates firms to develop business model innovation and how such effects are moderated by strategic flexibility.

In this study, a questionnaire-based survey was undertaken to test the proposed hypotheses. The empirical study was conducted on a sample of 204 firms using two key informants (408 respondents) in China. The regression model is used to test the proposed model.

This research finds that both responsive market orientation (RMO) and proactive market orientation (PMO) have a positive effect on business model innovation. The effects of RMO and PMO on business model innovation are contingent on resource (coordination) flexibility in different ways. More importantly, this study finds that resource flexibility enhances the positive effect of RMO and weakens the positive effect of PMO. The study also finds that coordination flexibility enhances the positive effect of PMO.

Future research can explore the internal mechanisms through which RMO and PMO promote business model innovations. Although the study finds that both the MOs promote business model innovation, they may promote business model innovation through different mediating effects. Future research can explore the role of external dynamic capabilities. This research mainly focuses on the internal dynamic capability of focal firms. However, as a focal firm-centered boundary spanning activity system, to transform into a new business model, firms not only need to reconfigure internal resource base, but also need to realign external collaboration network.

This research also bears important managerial implications. First, firms should be aware of the positive effect of MO on business model innovation. Firms with higher level of RMO or PMO can promote business model innovation. Second, when firms implement RMO for business model innovation, managers should focus on resource flexibility. Where MO is responsive, marketing managers need to be concerned with ensuring various applications of existing resource so as to understand effectively the current customers and market domain. Third, to leverage PMO for business model innovation, firms should adopt coordination flexibility. For firms with higher level PMO, firms should try to find the new internal coordination process for customer latent needs.

The conclusion extends the business model innovation research from the view of dynamic capabilities. As one of types of dynamic capabilities, MO is also the important antecedent of business model innovation. Further, this research also discusses the role strategic flexibility plays in business model innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the differences between proactive and reactive market research techniques during the development of new market offerings. The study focused on the financial and innovative performance of traditional market research techniques, such as focus groups and in‐depth interviews, in comparison to more co‐creation‐oriented techniques that are designed to capture customers' value‐in‐use.

The study was a two‐stage process. Study I, an empirical investigation of 195 development projects in European companies, examined how these companies use different market research techniques and how this relates to the profit margins of new products and services. Study II designed an experiment with 50 users of a consumer good and evaluated the contribution of different market research techniques, based on the degree of originality and customer value.

Significant differences were found, in terms of both content and originality, between the technique based on customer co‐creation and the two traditional market research techniques (Study II). These findings can help to explain why the relationship between the use of market research techniques and profit margin (Study I) is stronger for co‐creation techniques than it is for traditional market research techniques.

Despite empirical evidence that the application of market research techniques based on co‐creation can lead to original ideas, there is a lack of valid studies regarding how co‐creation techniques perform in relation to more traditional methods of collaboration with customers.

Customer co‐creation is becoming increasingly popular among companies, and intensive communication with customers is generally seen as a determinant of the success of a new service or product. The purpose of this study is to analyze customer co‐creation based on four dimensions of communication – frequency, direction, modality, and content – in order to understand the value of customer co‐creation in service innovation. One of the key aims of the study is to investigate whether all dimensions of customer co‐creation have an effect on product and market success, and if the effect depends on the degree of innovativeness of a development project.

The authors conducted a study including 334 managers with experience in new service and product development to examine how development projects applied customer co‐creation in terms of communication in order to address future customer needs. Data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS). The first analysis was performed with a sub‐sample of 207 development projects regarding incremental innovations. A subsequent analysis was performed with a sub‐sample of 77 development projects on radical innovations.

A total of three of the four dimensions of customer co‐creation (frequency, direction, and content) have a positive and equally significant effect on product success when developing incremental innovations. For radical innovations, frequency has a positive effect and content has a negative significant effect on product success. These findings suggest that co‐creation and innovation can be combined, but that the choice of methods for co‐creation differs depending on whether incremental or radical innovations are developed.

Despite a general consensus that co‐creation with customers is beneficial, there is a lack of agreement regarding how and why. The present article addresses this shortcoming and shows that co‐creation is largely about communicating with customers in order to understand their future needs. On the other hand, a company working on radical innovations may wish to limit customer input that is too concrete or solution based.