Building Your Customer R&D: Putting People Back at the Heart of Innovation

The Client at the Heart of the Company

The idea that the client should be at the heart of the company is often repeated but too rarely embodied. Because today’s client is no longer just a buyer: they are a citizen, a “consum-actor”, a member of communities, and a bearer of values. They choose brands as much for their meaning as for their products. They want to participate, co-create, and be recognized as a full-fledged actor of progress.

Why Create a Customer R&D?

For several decades, two major forces have shaped our relationship with the market: category management on one hand, and techno push on the other.

Category Management

It has helped structure offers around segments, targets, and personas, optimizing product ranges. But by classifying consumers, we sometimes forgot to truly listen to them. The core issue isn’t filling boxes, it’s about deeply understanding the people we serve.

Techno Push

For years, progress through technology has been the dominant mindset. R&D often pushed technological innovations assuming that the market would follow. This “always more” logic fed an endless cycle of renewal, added unnecessary features, increased prices, and led to forms of planned or perceived obsolescence. Progress became confused with the race for novelty, sometimes at the expense of common sense and real needs.

“Growth Happens Locally”

A crucial reason to build Customer R&D, especially for international companies, is the new definition of modernity. In developing countries, modernity no longer means adopting Western models. It now means choosing products that respect local culture and lifestyles, and that contribute to national and community prosperity. For a global brand, the question becomes: How can you be Brazilian in Brazil, Indian in India, South African in South Africa? Being modern today might actually mean slowing down the race forward, bringing back meaning, common sense, and humanity at the heart of progress.

Changing Era, Changing Model

Technology is no longer the only path to progress. It must once again serve people and the planet, not the other way around. 21st-century innovation rests on a new balance:

• Technology: a driver of efficiency and performance through discovery

• Human: ensuring that well-being, inclusivity, and quality of life come first

• Planet: meeting the demands of sustainability, moderation, and shared prosperity.

The challenge is no longer just to create new uses, but to ensure that every step forward benefits society while respecting its ecological boundaries.

Creating a Customer R&D: Active Listening and Shared Innovation

This is where a new approach emerges: creating a Customer R&D.

The expression may sound paradoxical and that’s intentional.

It represents the fertile tension between two worlds long opposed: yesterday’s R&D, focused on technology, and tomorrow’s, centered on people.

Listening now becomes as strategic as technological research.

Structured, active listening reveals new insights, unspoken needs, new opportunity spaces, and new territories for human and societal value creation.

This approach relies on methods such as design thinking, ethnographic observation, mind mapping, and active listening.

We no longer speak only to “customers”, but to whole people with their cultural contexts, visions of progress, and aspirations.

Learnings from fieldwork in India, Brazil, Italy, or Canada form a living body of knowledge.

They allow brands to speak each country’s language and culture, understand its codes, and embody its dreams.

Complementarity and Synergy with Marketing

Customer R&D doesn’t replace marketing, it enriches it.

Where marketing structures the offer, Customer R&D explores usage.

The two become complementary:

• Ethno research upstream, to capture deep expectations

• Marketing downstream, to translate them into tangible offers

A New Dimension of R&D

Customer R&D resembles traditional research but expands it. It must feed into all stages of technological R&D, both upstream, to inspire meaning and societal vision, and downstream, to ensure that innovation truly serves the progress expected by people. Customer R&D reaffirms the need to balance TECHNO-driven and HUMAN-driven research to reconnect rationality and humanity.

A New Path Toward Local Circularity

This approach gives concrete meaning to subsidiarity and local anchoring.

It becomes a powerful lever of circularity:

1. Listen to people to understand their needs and culture

2. Co-create with them products that reflect who they are, rediscovering forgotten principles, crafts, and know-how rooted in their culture and environment, impossible to find from a Paris office

3. Produce locally, combining new technologies with traditional solutions, ensuring the right technology, at the right price, for the right use.

In doing so, it helps build ecosystems of shared prosperity, where every innovation creates connection, employment, and sustainability.

This is how we can invent a new modernity.

Customer R&D: The Engine of Regrowth

Creating a Customer R&D means bringing research back to a human scale, rediscovering the company’s original mission: to understand the world in order to contribute to it.

It’s also a strategy of Regrowth, reconnecting innovation, usefulness, and humanity.

Because by listening, we create better.

By co-creating, we share value.

And by sharing, we foster lasting prosperity.

Customer R&D is a school of humility and cooperation.

It restores meaning to technology, bridges cultures, and gives back value to innovation.

It transforms companies into learning communities, able to evolve with their clients.

A Culture of Shared Progress

Customer R&D is far more than a method, it is a culture of shared progress.

A culture that reconnects technology with humanity, innovation with purpose, and performance with the planet.

It is a powerful path toward regrowth, where every company, wherever it operates, becomes a driver of social, economic, and environmental progress.