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Customer integration into the innovation process is about to become a best practice. The lead‐user approach has proven to be especially valuable when reducing discontinuous innovation's market risk. Since the theory of customer integration still lacks a concept and processes, this article illustrates how companies can be helped from a practice perspective to implement customer integration and maximize market safety. Triggered by the results of an in‐depth case study, we adapted Lettl's explorative model of customers’ contribution to the new product development (NPD) process, which was originally developed for the medical technology industry, to engineering companies.