Challenges of customer innovation in B2B environment

The research on user involvement in innovation is very broad. In past years this research stream demonstrated us how to successfully engage users as a sources of ideas and innovation, introduced such terms as "crowdsourcing" and "lead users", focused a lot on idea competitions and online communities. There is hardly any firm, which could reach long term success without assessing customer needs, desires, satisfaction. The cases of customer innovation in B2B are rather scarce and the understanding of the challenges companies face on this route is missing. We present a research of three cases of IT companies and their challenges and wishes in customer innovation. To do so, we conducted the semi-structured interviews with company representatives and created cases studies of their practices, with following cross-case analyses.