The Customer — an Untapped Source of Innovation. Developing a Customer Integration Network in HP

In general, a company has to overcome two environmental challenges. First of all, customers drive a company’s business through their demands and their preferences. They can demand much from a company, since changing to another vendor is quite easy in a buyer’s market. Secondly, technology-intensive companies face a swiftly changing competitive environment characterized by shortened product and service life cycles as well as by knowledge-dependent products and services. In order to overcome these challenges and ensure organic growth, a company should launch customer-required product and services and become more customer centered, thus increasing customer loyalty. And this requires a better understanding of customers. It therefore follows that customers’ requirements can be better fulfilled by directly involving them in the innovation process. The main purpose of the bilateral project between the HP support and the researchers of KnowledgeSource was thus to develop a model that would support the integration of both explicit and implicit customer knowledge, i.e. it would enable constant bilateral knowledge flows between the customers and the company in order to improve products and services. HP’s historical background is described, followed by the internal and external challenges that the company faces. Thereafter the approach to the suggested solution - the steps leading to the building of a knowledge network - is described. The case is concluded with the most important lessons learned and general recommendations.