6. Conclusion
To build an innovation process involving a brand community, a firm should create and manage its relations with that community carefully. It can base its approach on six mechanisms that support innovation: animation, openness, structuring, linking, theorization and integration. This innovation process crosses firm and community borders and benefits from the assets provided by both types of organization. When the firm reshapes its boundaries, it can revise its innovation processes and integrate user knowledge and innovations. The resulting innovative offer includes a toolkit for innovation, provides support for brand community development, and encourages constant contact with the most active members. With its core competency of managing relations with the community, the firm can generate the most interesting innovations from the users’ point of view, develop a loyal user base, enjoy lower innovation costs, and secure a strong competitive advantage in its field. Thus, a new type of competition seems likely to emerge, in which firms aim not only to develop the best product in terms of functionalities or cost, but also to give their product characteristics that enable users to innovate, give it meaning, hack it, and adapt it to their increasingly individual and complex needs.
