Changes in production and consumption patterns are a crucial element of the sustainability agenda. Communication between product developers and users, and user integration in product development, can serve as a means for organizational as well as individual learning processes, resulting in sustainable product development. Recent approaches to innovation research describe the role of users in the innovation process as essential. However, conventional market research gives consumers a passive role as a mere object of research instead of considering them as possible innovators themselves. Improved methods, such as INNOCOPE (innovating through consumer-integrated product development), tested in this study with a cycle manufacturer and resulting in a new product, a pedelec, are needed for effective communication, activating consumers and enabling them to promote sustainability goals. Through co-operative product development processes key factors facilitating and obstructing the adoption of sustainable innovations may be identified. Such processes can enhance the emergence and diffusion of sustainable product innovations and different forms and bodies of knowledge can be combined. Integrating users' contextual everyday knowledge of the product with the technical knowledge of companies may lead to mutual learning, technical innovations and changes in consumer behaviour.
Changes in production and consumption patterns are a crucial element of the sustainability agenda. Communication between product developers and users, and user integration in product development, can serve as a means for organizational as well as individual learning processes, resulting in sustainable product development. Recent approaches to innovation research describe the role of users in the innovation process as essential. However, conventional market research gives consumers a passive role as a mere object of research instead of considering them as possible innovators themselves. Improved methods, such as INNOCOPE (innovating through consumer-integrated product development), tested in this study with a cycle manufacturer and resulting in a new product, a pedelec, are needed for effective communication, activating consumers and enabling them to promote sustainability goals. Through co-operative product development processes key factors facilitating and obstructing the adoption of sustainable innovations may be identified. Such processes can enhance the emergence and diffusion of sustainable product innovations and different forms and bodies of knowledge can be combined. Integrating users' contextual everyday knowledge of the product with the technical knowledge of companies may lead to mutual learning, technical innovations and changes in consumer behaviour.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.