As the majority of new products fail it is important to focus on the needs and preferences of the consumers in new product development. Consumers are increasingly recognised as important co-developers of innovations, often developing new functions for technologies, solving unforeseen problems...

Innovation is an interactive learning process which is of special interest for emerging technologies in which complex complementary knowledge from heterogeneous stakeholders is combined. In the emerging phase of technology development a lot of knowledge is tacit and can only be transferred...