Collaborative Learning from Customer's Experiences and Leadership

Innovation is a critical issue in sustaining competitive advantage. Therefore speedy availability and a high transfer and reusability of knowledge as a basis for innovation is urgently needed in order to enable customer knowledge management innovation teams to enable efficient, effective innovative work in specific knowledge-intensive business processes. In this context learning from the customer is of primary interest. Starting from the presentation of an ambidextrous leadership model of teams we will disucss some limitations. As this current approach cannot truly demonstrate the possibilities of fostering team innovation there is a need for an improved approach. To address this problem we will broaden the ambidextrous leadership model of teams and combine it with the author's recent research in customer knowledge management. In detail three aspects will be discussed, namely the characteristics of knowledge, the involved knowledge processes and finally a customer knowledge management model, the so called TOMI-customer knowledge model, for fostering team innovation.