Involving Customers in the Service Innovation Process

This chapter examines practices of involving customers in the service innovation process. Even though customer-centric views are increasingly gaining ground in the literature, there is not much research into the organisation of innovation processes in which customers actually participate. In this chapter we describe an action-research project where we, together with a case company, developed and tested several methods for customer participation. The company is a medium-sized Finnish insurance company which has developed several incremental service innovations during recent years. As the next step it wanted to adopt a systematic, genuinely customer-oriented innovation model