Michael Christensen: Management, Harvard Business School
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Customer Centricity Capabilities: Linking Market Demand and Firm Resources
This paper responds to recent calls within the field of strategic management to better incorporate an understanding of customers and the demand environment into organizational research. We identify a unique organizational capability – customer centricity – that enables firms to understand critical features of the demand environment and use that information to then marshal or develop the appropriate resources to meet that demand. Using a longitudinal dataset of S&P 500 companies, we demonstrate how firms’ customer centricity capabilities impact firm performance, as well as how those specific capabilities further augment the efficacy of other organizational efforts and expenditures. Furthermore, we explore how the value of these capabilities are contingent upon specific environmental conditions.