Customer-driven codevelopment: a fast-track to radical innovation in b2b

As the industrial and economic world is becoming ever more complex, undertaking virtuous invention-innovation capabilities seems to be the only competitive strategy to accomplish in order to adapt, profit and survive. The rising of complexity poses serious challenges to every company in this system so that they are called to shift towards more collaborative competitive strategies. In this vein, collaborative creation and development among a spectrum of heterogeneous industrial partners are investigated in this paper, as they represent the holy grail to accomplish radical inventions/innovations. A probabilistic theoretical model is proposed according to two dimensions: Partner Proximity (in terms of closeness to the company’s collaborating ecosystem) and Kind of Co-development (whether Focal company-driven or Customer-driven); different paths to Radical Innovation emerge, each one with its peculiar implications.