RSM Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University suggests that listening to your customers doesn’t always result in the best innovations for companies. Researchers looked into 132 recent innovation projects and found that including customers in the design process was only a good idea when developing radical innovations designed explicitly around functionality. “Developing products in cooperation with customers is a very fashionable practice in product design currently,” says lead researcher Jan Van den Ende. “However, studies have yet to show conclusively when this is a good idea, and when it is not."