ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the goals of user integration, different levels of integration. It examines the users' contributions vary strongly across the different phases of the product development process and describes some factors and challenging in user integration, while others are seen as supportive preconditions. The chapter provides the influencing factors can be divided into product characteristics, user capabilities, preconditions in the company and the quality of the interaction process. It offers some hints on specific success factors of user integration in sustainable product development. The chapter draws on the literature and also provides the factors that should be considered when planning a user-integration process. It shows that preliminary practical recommendations for user-integration processes. The chapter also describes the role of users and relevant user knowledge may change during the innovation process, and user knowledge about products may generally be divided into utilisation knowledge and technical knowledge.
