MIT Sloan Management Review

When customers collaborate with suppliers they can build trust, reduce relational stress, and increase innovation-related activities.

Companies that provide professional services have not always been eager to invest in customer education initiatives. For such companies, it has remained unclear what economic benefit they would gain by providing customers with the skills and abilities needed to become more knowledgeable customers.

Conventional wisdom suggests that companies should avoid growing dependent on their business partners.

To shift toward high-quality service strategies, managers must adopt training and recruiting policies that compensate for institutional barriers to human resource investment.