Innovation has become unavoidable choice for companies to survive. However, a high percentage of new products fail, which increase the risk of using innovative ideas. Therefore, to control and reduce the risk of introducing new products, most companies need to invent new products that can meet the customers’ real needs. Accordingly, customer must be the main source of the information through which the ideas of new products are generated. Having the knowledge about the market needs and trends is not enough as the knowledge needs to be translated into real products. Hence, capabilities, in this context, play a vital role to enhance product innovation performance of the organizations. Thus, this study investigates the role of manufacturing capabilities in enhancing the or-ganizations’ abilities to translate the ideas into the right product that can meet customers’ needs. Moreover, this paper discusses the link between customer knowledge management and developing manufacturing capabilities. The study is conducted in Malaysia, and uses the information of 134 manufacturing companies for the survey. Partial least square is used to obtain the results. The findings are discussed and compared with other results in the literature.

This paper examines the effect of different factors on customer knowledge management development for a custom organization in Bandar Abbas, Iran. The statistical population of this research includes all 440 managers and employees in different levels where 205 people are randomly selected for this survey. Using t-student as well as Friedman tests, the study has confirmed that organizational culture, training, strategy, information and organizational infrastructure, top management commitment, organizational conflict, standardization, employee performance, communication, budget support and necessary skills could influence positively on knowledge management development. In our survey, training is also believed to be the most influential factor.