Approach of Companies to Customers as Suitable Source of Incentive to Innovate

Companies constantly need to adapt to changing business environment, therefore innovations are becoming an everyday reality in business practice. In an effort to innovate towards ensuring, respectively maintaining a strong competitive position, companies seek incentives to innovate at different places. Customers appear to be the most suitable source in this case, as companies try to adapt and thus satisfy their needs by implementing innovations. This paper clarifies the justness of engaging customers in an innovation process of a company and presents results of a research which dealt with whether companies operating in Slovakia focus on customer satisfaction, the level of their mutual communication and how they develop and regulate the behaviour of their employees oriented to customers. The aim of this paper is describe the present state of orientation companies on their customers and design the simple tool to analyse customer orientation.