Recent research places an increased emphasis on the inclusion of the customer in value creation, learning and innovation processes; yet, there remains a gap in the understanding of just how such customer involvement may work. This paper aims to address this gap by examining two aspects of customer involvement – their knowledgeability and their agency. In addition, three boundaries (semantic, syntactic and pragmatic) across which relationship development occurs and which may facilitate and/or inhibit value co-creation, collaborative learning and innovation processes have been explored.