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We're entering what might be called the Bottom-Up Economy. As the Internet's influence grows, we're seeing its intrinsic egalitarianism and tendency to empower the small start to change many aspects of modern life. Customers today have more options and less loyalty. They will migrate to businesses that see them as participants in a process rather than as just consumers.

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In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for "co-creation of value": The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly -- company and customer working hand in hand.

Link from isen.com.

The "co-creation of value" is an integral part of most Agile methodologies: in XP, you have a customer representative on-site ready to be consulted; in other variants, at the very least, the requirements and specifications for your product/code aren't locked down, allowing the customer to request changes as they discover what they want through each iteration. The second sets off numerous feature-creep alarms, but re-aligning your process to avoid the damage feature-creep causes is usually one of the major parts of the Agile methodologies.