Abstract

In a previous study, we reviewed the academic literature about customer participation, corporate strategy, and business models. We selected the different keywords that authors have used to refer to user participation in the development or design of products and services. Based on these concepts, we observed the relation that the authors establish between user participation and new product development, and user participation and value creation from a strategy and business model perspective, which includes the individual firm´s perspective and customer satisfaction. In that article, we focused on the searches for keywords in relation to the terms “corporate strategy” and “business model.” For this purpose, we used VantagePoint software (The Search Technology Inc.) to create a co-keyword matrix, in which the rows were keywords related to participation types and columns referred to the keywords which mentioned strategy and business model. Now, the objective of this article is to use the ideas and terms obtained from this review of the user/customer participation, to define and validate an empirical research. This article presents a case study, which is focused on several firms located in our area, in order to discover how real companies, deal with this topic.