Hotels also sought customers who could articulate views on potential innovations, and this required knowledge of the product or process, with one firm (hotel A) favouring regular customers as operants. The same hotel had a hierarchical ‘map’ of their customers, engaging with selected regular customers in the formative co-creation stage of innovation and other customers in the confirmative final stages of testing prior to rolling out the innovation across the hotel network. This required a considerable degree of management expertise in the different stages of co-creation.