CKM or the economics of trust

I just read a remarkable article from Michael Gilbert, Marius Leibold, and Gilbert Probst called "Five styles of Customer Knowledge Management and how smart companies put them into action". Customer Knowledge Management is about "gaining, sharing and expanding knowledge of (inside) the customer: Individual or group experiences in applications, competitor behavior, possible future solutions, etc."

It raises an interesting question:

Why do many customer-driven companies not access the knowledge of their customers directly?

Indeed, companies are so used to indirect methods such as market research that they even have a hard time implementing KM systems geared at sharing the customer knowledge that salespeople have. But some do go beyond that, and really engage into meaningful conversations with their customers to:
- co-produce knowledge ("prosumerism") e.g. IKEA
- learn together ("Team-based co-learning" e.g. Amazon
- innovate ("Mutual Innovation") e.g. Silicon Graphics
- engage them in the creation process ("creation communities) e.g. Microsoft (beta releases)
- co-create future business together ("Joint Intellectual Property") e.g. Skandia

CKM can provide a significant competitive advantage to companies, but there are stumbling blocks that the authors of the article describe in details. What strikes me is the level of mutual trust needed to make this CKM approach work. This goes far beyond customer focus. It's more like customer respect