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To stay competitive, firms need to build great products but they also need to lend these products to the uses and misuses of their customers and learn extensively from them. This is the first book to explore the idea that allowing customers to adapt features in online products or services to suit their needs is the key to viral growth.

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1. Why is Viral Growth Important? 2. The Viral Model 3. Technological Factors 4. Demonstrating Skills, Proficiency, Taste and Accomplishments 5. Seeing and Being Seen 6. Getting It Right 7. Getting It Wrong 8. Conclusion

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"Fisher, Abbott and Lyytinen have written a fascinating and engaging book on the new era of customer empowerment. Executives are now more challenged than ever to understand customer behavior and the drivers for market growth. This book offers key insights for executives who desire to embark on a journey of discovery with customers, as they innovate on behalf of customers to transform their organizations and industries." - Lynda Applegate, Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration at Harvard -Business School

"Finally, we have a book that breaks the mould by bringing the type of thinking on innovation that is most appropriate for today´s information-intensive and networked world. The authors provide insight through illustration in a highly readable and compelling prose. It is a must-read for executives who want to their companies to compete and win." - Varun Grover, Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, Clemson University

"While we can´t depend on customers to tell us what to build, we can provide them with the tools necessary to use technology in new and unanticipated ways, and we can learn a great deal by observing their actual use. This book will show you how to enable and nurture the power of your customers to innovate." - Marty Cagan, Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group

"If you ever thought that listening to your customers only served to increase customer satisfaction scores, think again. This book definitively argues that customers´ misuse of products often has pronounced effects on the growth rates of product adoption and can lead to viral growth." - Doug Leone, General Partner at Sequoia Capital

"A book grounded in both the realm of higher learning and the school of hard knocks; it provides a simple but powerful model for success in information-intensive ventures... It explains the success of some of the most spectacular successes of the past generation, and provides valuable guidance on how to do it and what to avoid." - John Leslie King, W.W. Professor of Information at University of Michigan

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