Customer competence

The ability to serve a particular market. It is not sufficient for a technology to have many applications. To leverage its technology by applying it to additional markets, a firm must build complementary market-related assets to serve those markets. This is called a customer competence. Market-related resources include:

• knowledge of customer needs, preferences
• purchasing procedures,
• distribution and sales
• access to customers,
• customer goodwill or franchise reflected in the reputation of the firm and its brands
• communication channels for exchange of information between the firm and customers during development and commercialization of the product.

Together these market-related resources constitute the customer competence.