A Contemporary and Systematic Literature Review of User-centric Innovation: A Consumer Perspective

This paper aims to provide a contemporary, critical and systematic overview of user-centric innovation (UCI) from a consumer perspective. The objectives of this paper were to identify and categorise gaps in research and/or knowledge, contextually classify empirical UCI studies, critically analyse the literature in terms of coalition/fragmentation and derive practitioner implications for industry implementation. Our findings indicate that user communities should be carefully evaluated by firm management as they can represent significant risks in relation to resource requirements as well as opportunities for capitalising on new product development. Furthermore, by ascertaining which product-related resources the consumers are lacking, it may provide organisations with details of the consumers’ ahead-of-the-market needs and may be used to devise effective recognition-based proactive UCI strategies. A research framework was also formulated to help future UCI researchers navigate the complex network of previous research and to assist in developing more structured and focussed future research questions.