Customer engagement design in industrial innovation

While the design of goods and services is undeniably important in cultivating customer engagement (CE) with industrial innovations, the theoretical interface of industrial design, innovation, and CE remains nebulous, exposing an important literature-based gap. Relatedly, while the literature has focused on the firm as the focal designing stakeholder, further knowledge building is needed regarding the engagement of other stakeholders (e.g., employees or fellow customers), who may co-design an industrial firm's offering (e.g., by contributing to its product development activity), and its effect on CE. That is, as co-designing stakeholders can help design industrial offerings through their respective engagement, we advance an omni-stakeholder perspective of industrial design in this paper. We address these issues by composing a conceptual model and an associated set of propositions that explore the effect of different stakeholders' engagement in co-designing industrial innovations, and their respective effect on CE with the innovation. Next, we introduce the papers contained in this Issue and their links to the framework. We conclude by outlining further research avenues that arise from our analyses.