Virtual Customer Environments: IT-Enabled Customer Co-innovation and Value Co-creation - Information Technology and Product Development - page 120

Strategies and practices that help the company integrate VCE initiatives with
other CRM initiatives are also of particular importance. This lets the company
enhance the customer experience by finding synergies with a customer's other
product-related interactions (for example, offline product events). For example,
product-marketing activities may be initiated in the VCE and be continued in offline
settings. Such an approach may enable finding and leveraging synergies between
VCE activities and the company's overall approach to brand management.
In conclusion, VCEs portend a new era in customer involvement in innovation
and value creation. As the number of companies deploying different forms of VCEs
to embrace customers as partners in innovation continue to increase, the importance
of research on issues related to the successful design and deployment of such vir-
tual environment also increase. This chapter has provided an introduction to the
concept of VCEs and outlined several issues for future research. It is hoped that
future studies will explore these and other issues and contribute toward a better
understanding of the deployment and management of VCEs in varied innovation
contexts.
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