Paper info

Rethinking the Centrality of Customer and Supplier Interaction inInnovation

Michael Lewis, Nigel Caldwell, Thomas Johnsen and Wendy Phillips

The paper was published at the 21st IMP-conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2005.

This paper evaluates the assumption that interaction within customer-supplier relationships is alwaysthe pivotal point for innovation. It argues that the relevance of customer and supplier relationshipsdepends on the nature and maturity of the technology being developed, thus exploring the potentialvariation in customer-supplier interactions during different phases of the innovation life cycle. Thepaper commences with a brief introduction to the literature and then uses the findings from anexploratory set of interviews to illustrate the premise of the paper. The paper concludes with adiscussion of the implications of the findings and outlines the plans for the next stage of the research.Keywords: technology, interaction, relationships, innovation life cycle.