The role of customer co-creation at the fuzzy front-end: a systematic review of the literature

This paper aims to provide a first overview of the scientific literature on customer co-creation (CCC) at an early phase of innovation processes that is referred to as the fuzzy front-end (FFE). CCC refers to the integration of customers in innovation activities and is also described as the active integration of customers in the open innovation process. The FFE is characterised by three stages that could be described as 1) discovering new opportunities, 2) assessing these opportunities and 3) turning promising opportunities into a business case. This paper therefore explores CCC as a tool or element of the FFE within the framework of the open innovation process for the active integration of customers in order to generate new creative ideas or concepts. At present, there appear to be only a few scientific articles that research the relation of CCC and the FFE in detail. Therefore, this paper aims to systematically analyse the literature to identify previous work that studied CCC as an element of the FFE, provide a synthesis and critical discussion and identify areas of future research.