Corporate consulting in product innovation: overcoming the barriers to utilization

Companies in the business‐to‐business segment increasingly try to expand their product offerings into customer solutions offerings. This often implies adding value through professional services such as systems integration and business consulting related to the parent organization’s products. The addition of a consultative component to the product business both poses new challenges and provides new possibilities for the product organization’s innovation processes. We argue that corporate consulting units provide a vital source of knowledge for organizations seeking to increase their innovation capacity by learning about and from their customers. The current paper discusses the knowledge created in such consulting business as well as the filters that hinder utilizing this knowledge in the innovation processes of the product‐oriented organization.