Abstract
User involvement in product innovation has been a research issue for at least 25 years that has produced many findings. Nevertheless, most of these findings do not offer practicing managers any actionable knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be used as a basis for their actions. Research has, for instance, shown that user involvement can result in novel ideas and innovations from lead users (Shaw, 1985; von Hippel, 1977, 1986, 1988), may generate more accurate knowledge regarding users’ needs and wishes (Hennestad, 1999) and reveal their latent needs (Veryzer, 1998), can work as a mutual learning process for both users and companies (Anderson & Crocca, 1993; Sinkula, 1994), can shorten development times (Gupta & Wilemon, 1990; Iansiti & MacCormack, 1997), and may enable the collaborative creation of business and user value (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000). Unfortunately, managers wanting to involve users in their product involvement get little practical guidance from the literature regarding what to expect from such endeavors. For instance, just learning that users have been the source of a vast majority of innovations is not enough for practitioners. They need to know whether the result is applicable to their businesses. Because user involvement is not without cost, they need to know the extra benefit achieved with user involvement. It is unlikely that the answers to these questions can be found in the literature. Accordingly, for managers not satisfied with just adopting the contemporary hypes and using the right buzzwords, there are a lot of uncertainties that need to be resolved before involving users in their product innovation processes.