THE CUSTOMER - ONLY A SOURCE OF INFORMATION OR CO - PRODUCER?

This paper presents the results of a research regarding the manners for the organizations to access the user's needs in order to create novel and useful products. There are cases when organizations use methods which assume only a user needs research in order to gain useful information for developing new products. In these situations the customer is a passive part of product development process. For this reason we call them passive user involvement manners. This approach is useful when we deal with latent needs; the customers are not aware of what they need. In most of the cases the results of using these methods are radical innovations.