Customer Competences and Innovation Capability (PDF)

Innovations constitute one essential success factor for the development, progress, and success of companies. Thus, striving for the creation of innovation can be beneficial. One way to create innovations is to increase the innovation capability of companies in order to enhance the knowledge base in that company. In plenty of innovation-related research, it turned out that customers can be one important source of new knowledge. Thus, they can also be a driver for increasing innovation capability and hence ultimately help to foster the creation of innovations. Due to potential effects of customers on innovation capability, companies could strive to generally integrate customers into their innovation activities. However, companies should consider differences of customers in order to identify the most promising customers for their innovation activities. Therefore, the idea of competences of an individual is applied, since competences integrate abilities, skills, and knowledge and are thus a wide construct respecting different facets of a customer. With the concept of customer competences, companies might be enabled to identify the most beneficial customers for their innovation activities in order to increase their innovation capability. Accordingly, in order to explain interrelations between particular customer competences and the innovation capability of a company, this research delivers a well-founded basis by investigating the general existence of interrelations between customer competences and the innovation capability of companies.

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