Matching Co-innovation Project Types to Diverse Customer Relationships: Perspective of an Industrial Technology Supplier

Abstract

Co-innovation between suppliers and their customers provides important benefits but is not without challenges. Especially in technologically complex industrial context co-innovation projects need careful planning and preparing. Through eight cases, this qualitative study takes the perspective of the supplier and empirically identifies three types of supplier-customer co-innovation projects and for each project type, the supplier’s co-innovation goal, potential matching customer relationships, and related managerial benefits and challenges are described. The results contribute to the co-innovation research by presenting a framework for matching supplier’s co-innovation goals to customer relationship types, which brings out the variety of co-innovation projects that even a single supplier can face and must manage.