Open innovation through customers: collaborative web-based platforms for ethically and socially responsible new products

This chapter aims at analyzing how firms can successfully embrace an Open Innovation (OI) process through customers, involving them, individually or in communities, in the co-creation of ideas, knowledge, products, services, processes, putting into action and integrating their creativity with firms’ resources. Three main areas of interest are analyzed through a literature review process, to create a framework able to show the challenges organizations have to meet simultaneously externally (i.e. consumerism) and internally (i.e. organizational changes) in this shift of the innovation paradigm: consumerism features and challenges, OI approach and web-based platforms, and organizational issues involved in the OI paradigm shift. This chapter affords consumerism and OI approach, while the next, which is the sequel of this one, discusses OI platforms and organizational changes as well as the resulting framework. Four contributions distinguish this study: (i) the link between consumerism and OI; (ii) the focus on customers as a source of external innovation; (iii) the identification of alternative ways to access OI with customers and their features; (iv) the disclosure of a “hybrid” mode to develop OI through customers.