Customer insights play a critical role in innovation. In recent years, articles studying customer insights for innovation have risen in marketing and other fields such as innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. However, the literature on customer insights for innovation grew fragmented and plagued by inconsistent definitions and ambiguity. The literature also lacks a precise classification of different domains of customer insights for innovation. This article offers four key contributions. First, it clearly and consistently defines customer insights for innovation. Second, it proposes a “customer insights process” that describes the activities firms and customer insights intermediaries (e.g., market research agencies) use to generate, disseminate, and apply customer insights for innovation. Third, it offers a synthesis of the knowledge on customer insights for innovation along ten domains of customer insights for innovation: (1) crowdsourcing, (2) co-creating, (3) imagining, (4) observing, (5) testing, (6) intruding, (7) interpreting, (8) organizing, (9) deciding, and (10) tracking. Fourth, the authors qualify and quantify the managerial importance and potential for scholarly research in these domains of customer insights for innovation. They conducted 12 in-depth interviews with executives at market research agencies such as Ipsos, Kantar, Nielsen, IQVIA, and GfK to do so. They surveyed 305 managers working in innovation, marketing, strategy, and customer experience. The article concludes with a research agenda for marketing aimed at igniting knowledge development in high-priority domains for customer insights for innovation.

客户洞察在创新中起着至关重要的作用。近年来，在市场营销和其他领域（如创新、战略和创业）中，研究客户创新洞察的文章有所增加。然而，关于客户洞察对创新的文献变得支离破碎，并受到定义不一致和歧义的困扰。文献也缺乏对客户洞察创新不同领域的精确分类。本文提供了四个主要贡献。首先，它清晰一致地定义了用于创新的客户洞察。其次，它提出了一个“客户洞察流程”，描述了公司和客户洞察中介机构（例如市场研究机构）用来生成、传播和应用客户洞察进行创新的活动。第三，它综合了客户洞察创新的十个领域的创新洞察知识：（1） 众包，（2） 共同创造，（3） 想象，（4） 观察，（5） 测试，（6） 侵入，（7） 解释，（8） 组织，（9） 决定，以及 （10） 跟踪。第四，作者对客户洞察创新领域的管理重要性和学术研究的潜力进行了限定和量化。为此，他们对 Ipsos、Kantar、Nielsen、IQVIA 和 GfK 等市场研究机构的高管进行了 12 次深入访谈。他们调查了 305 名从事创新、营销、战略和客户体验工作的经理。本文最后提出了一个营销研究议程，旨在激发高优先级领域的知识发展，以获得客户洞察以促进创新。