Towards Sustainable Asset Management with Stronger Customer Integration: Risks and Opportunities of Customer Co-Creation

The life cycle perspective and sustainability have gathered a considerable support in academia and in industry. Manufacturing companies and their customers are increasingly aware of the life cycle perspective and indeed it is becoming a dominant way of thinking, also in asset management. The importance of bringing customers closer to the development processes has been emphasized in academia and in companies. The integration of customers into the development processes is seen as a promising source of new information and ideas which can be seeds for new business opportunities. The inclusion of customers is currently mostly limited to customer satisfaction surveys and marketing studies in the majority of business-to-business companies, although the importance of ascertaining the customer needs is widely articulated in the business world. Asset management could benefit from rich and reliable customer based information. Customer based information and a stronger connection to both the latent and explicit needs of customers help manufacturing companies to reach the sustainability targets set for their asset management. Contemplated more widely, this paper is a part of postgraduate studies aiming at finding methods and frameworks, which support the sustainable management of assets with the help of increased inclusion of the customer in a company's processes. The purpose of this paper is to describe the benefits and risks of integrating customer into development processes. Special attention is paid to the very beginning of product and service development processes, the front end of innovation.